Gatekeepers and hard hats: gender inequality in Ghana's oil industry

Abstract

Purpose This study empirically examines women's lived experiences in technical roles within Ghana's petroleum sector. It seeks to understand how women enter technical work, experience daily organisational practices, and navigate gendered constraints in a male-dominated, high-risk industry. Design/methodology/approach Using purposive and snowball sampling techniques, qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 15 women working in technical petroleum roles, including engineers, technicians, instrumentation specialists, geoscientists, operations officers, and health and safety staff. The interview transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and organised with the aid of NVivo version 15 software. Findings The findings show that women's entry into technical petroleum work is deliberate and effort-intensive. However, they face restricted access to core operational tasks. Safety certification and offshore deployment function as key gatekeeping mechanisms that shape career progression and technical visibility. Everyday organisational practices, including informal decision-making, communication norms, and task allocation, reproduce gender inequality, despite formal equality policies. Women respond by using adaptive strategies that prioritise career sustainability over advancement. Research limitations/implications This study is limited to women in Ghana's petroleum sector and may not fully capture experiences across other African contexts or extractive industries. The cross-sectional design limits insight into long-term career trajectories. Future research would benefit from longitudinal studies tracking women's technical careers over time, capturing progression, stagnation, and exit. Comparative studies across extractive sectors and national contexts would deepen our understanding of how organisational gatekeeping practices travel and adapt. Practical implications Top-management teams and managers of petroleum companies should establish transparent certification sponsorship criteria, implement gender-disaggregated deployment tracking, and restructure task allocation to ensure equitable access to core technical assignments and offshore rotations. They should design accountability mechanisms that make gatekeeping visible. Women should form peer networks with other women in technical roles for information-sharing about opportunities, sponsorship patterns, and navigation strategies and support each other's visibility in technical discussions. Social implications This study highlights how organisational practices perpetuate gender segregation in high-value technical work, limiting women's economic mobility and reinforcing societal gender hierarchies in Ghana's strategic industries. Originality/value The originality of this study lies in its empirical application to an under-studied context: technical petroleum work in Ghana and the broader Global South. The study provides the first detailed qualitative examination of women's lived experiences in technical petroleum roles in Ghana. It generates grounded insight into the specific mechanisms – certification sponsorship, offshore deployment, and task segregation – through which inequality is reproduced in high-risk operational settings. It challenges homogeneous representations of “women in oil and gas” by attending to intra-group variation shaped by class, geography, and family structure. It extends feminist institutionalism and gendered organisational theory to offshore technical environments.