– Oil and gas are the big story right now, and are in the spotlight in all contexts. “Thank goodness the North is finally on the agenda”, you read in the Oslo newspapers. What I am concerned about is that oil and energy will monopolise all the attention, all the resources, all the politics and organisation, such that all other regional resources will be neglected. Aren’t women with higher education degrees also a resource, and with knowledge that can also be “mined” and “refined” if only it were organised. We talk of interdisciplinary knowledge and culture as important for the future, but in the northern region it is energy and technology that are receiving all the attention right now, says Britt Kramvig.
Snow White and the prince
Kramvig is the senior researcher at the institute Norut Social Science Research in Tromsø, in the north of Norway, and is one of the contributors to a report published by the Nordic Council’s welfare project, Kvinner reiser, menn blir (Women leave, men stay). In the report Nordic researchers have written their contributions from a critical perspective: What differences arise between women and men in the outlying regions in respect to the Nordic welfare model and the local labour market?
Britt Kramvig has focused on Hammerfest local authority, where all the focus is on the Snøhvit oil project right now. According to Statoil’s (Statoil is the majority state owned Norwegian energy company) website Snøhvit is “hopefully only the beginning of what will be a North Norwegian oil adventure”. The name is possibly a nod to the environmental activists and other opponents of the project, who fear the Barents Sea will be polluted. Or perhaps there are other narratives and ideas that are behind the choice of name, hidden deep in the sub-conscious?
– I began to ponder what “Snøhvit” actually is, what kinds of narratives are actually employed. Do they say something about how they view the region, for example? Do they mean that technology will save the Barents region and “wake it up”, just like the prince woke Snow White?
– The large oil project in the Barents Sea has been given the name of a woman. But the figure Snow White is very different from the women other Norwegian oil fields have been named after. They have been named after the strong, active and spirited women of Norse mythology and tradition, such as Idun, Frigg, Sigyn and Hild.
Snow White, the princess from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, since adapted and honed by Disney, is first and foremost passive, waiting, undiscovered and pure. In “the Northern Norway oil fairy tale” “she” is deep asleep below the Barents Sea, while she waits for the technology – “the prince” – to wake her up and free her from the curse and make her queen of the new world.
– I don’t believe the oil companies have been so calculating in naming the project Snow White. However, we no longer consider what the name might mean; it has been naturalised. And I notice that it does something to people when we introduce these narratives, that it creates new images for them.
A Klondike atmosphere
In Hammerfest the industrialisation of the fishing trade took place relatively early. The town was marked by a Klondike atmosphere, with an international air and a shortage of labour. The solution was to use women from Finland and Sweden. They were brought in to work in the filleting factory during the high season. Hammerfest, however, was hit hard by the fisheries crisis at the beginning of the 90s. Findus, which had been a key business in the town since World War II, was shut down.
There is now a great deal of activity in the town once again, with the building of the new oil plant. – Snøhvit is only the first installation. More oil will be discovered in the Barents Sea, and it looks as if the next oil plant will be in Kirkenes. Hammerfest is, in other words, only the first phase of the project, but it is this town that will have to take the pressure, socially and culturally. It is here that the first adaption processes will take place, in seeing the possibilities, in creating an industry, and in managing to make it work. A whole floating town is actually being built in the middle of the existing town. The new town, however, is dominated by men, and the few women there are mostly catering staff.
Highly educated women
The average level of education is lower in Finnmark county than the Norwegian national average, if both sexes are taken together. However, in the age group 30-39, between the years 1984 and 2002 more women from Finnmark had gained a college or university degree than from any other part of the country. In 2003 the statistics over educated women are the same for Finnmark as they are for the rest of the country (38 vs 39 per cent), but Hammerfest still stands out with a particularly high number of educated women.
Britt Kramvig underlines that Statoil had set targets for how many women they would recruit to permanent positions when the operational phase of the project started. Nevertheless, they did not achieve these targets. – There are quite simply not enough women being educated in the subjects they are looking for, within technology and natural science. The choices girls make in their education have not changed very much if one looks at the statistics for the last 10-15 years. Perhaps part of the problem is in the language, and in how these professions are described. What image do young girls associate with the term “engineer”? How can a girl include such images in the narrative of her life? One idea is possibly to make the engineering jobs more humanist and social, to achieve a better dialogue between technology and industry on one side and the social sciences and the humanities on the other. I believe that it’s important that we now sit down and discuss these challenges. There’s no need for these issues to be in conflict with one another.
Translated by Matthew Whiting KILDEN