The seven-year battle for respect
Angelene Powell joined Ports of Auckland 17 years ago in the operations area.
‘‘It was a challenging seven years journey being accepted into the fold,’’ she said. ‘‘Some of the men were accepting of me. Others resisted.’’
She ended up leading the ship-planning and control team, which, she said, was ‘‘a little bit of a blow for some of my male colleagues at the time’’.
A physical marker of the gender power imbalance at the time was the presence of pornography in the workplace.
‘‘At its extreme I would roll up to do what I needed to do, there would be pornography, explicit imagery, and it was deliberate to intimidate me,’’ said Powell.
‘‘I learnt to push back on stuff like that.
‘‘In one instance I said to a first officer who deliberately put this photo on his screensaver, ‘Is that your wife?’ I said, ‘It’s lovely that you can bring in something to remind you of your family at home’. You had to find ways of dealing with it without being a victim of it.’’
She recalled comments such as: ‘‘This is a man’s world,’’ and ‘‘You don’t belong here,’’ and ‘‘Do you recognise you are making us change our way of being?’’
‘‘It’s now the norm to have females in our operational areas like stevedoring. It’s accepted,’’ she said.
And the porn has all gone.