In this episode, David Provan and Drew Rae examine workplace humor through the lens of psychosocial safety, discussing Helen Lingard, Rita Zhang, and Katie Chan's 2025 paper "Not Just a Joke: Women's Experiences of Workplace Humour in the Australian Construction Industry" published in the Journal of Management in Engineering. The research reveals that 65% of women in construction experience sexual harassment, with humor frequently weaponized to mask discrimination and maintain male dominance in a workforce that is 97% male.
The conversation explores how humor serves psychological purposes beyond entertainment, often functioning to establish power hierarchies and devalue professional contributions. Through survey data and qualitative interviews, the research demonstrates that passive coping strategies prevent organizations from understanding the true extent of harm. David and Drew argue that the "just joking" defense creates ambiguity that makes harassment difficult to report, particularly when supervisors are the perpetrators, emphasizing that effective psychosocial safety policies must explicitly address humor-based discrimination.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
"The harms are real. When we talk about expanding safety into the psychosocial space, however you might feel about that framing and whether safety people are the right people to be managing it, when we're talking about people getting hurt at work, gender based humour is a hazard." - Drew Rae
"I think this is the ultimate, you know, safety is not the absence of incident reports. This is clearly something that's happening to 50, 60, 70% of participants in this study and obviously representative of the broader population. If you're getting no insight into this through any of your systems, then you need to go looking." - David Provan
"The fact that something's a joke is being used almost like weaponised to mask or shield what's actually going on, we need to just like get totally away from the idea that humour is an excuse. The question isn't, is this a joke or not a joke? Question is, what was the underlying purpose of that joke?" - Drew Rae
"If no one's complaining, get worried. We know it's happening. We know that people don't complain. If you're not getting any complaints in your work site, that's not an indication that there's no problem or no harm. That's an indication that people are not feeling safe to complain." - Drew Rae
"Jokes are fine, but not these jokes. And I think this paper really helps us understand where we might be able to draw a less fuzzy boundary around what people can and can't joke about in the workplace." - David Provan
Resources:
Resource Link: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-7109
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
David Provan - cohost [0:00 - 0:57]
You're listening to the Safety of work podcast, episode 134. Today we're asking the question, does caring about psychosocial safety mean we have to stop telling jokes at work? Let's get started. Hey, everybody. My name's David Provan and I'm here with Drew Rae and we're from Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it. And this is our first episode for 2026, Drew. And we didn't do a great job in 2025 of regular episodes. But for all of our listeners that are hanging in there with us, we are committed to making 2026 a better year for the Safety of Work podcast. Right, Drew?
Drew Rae - cohost [0:57 - 1:16]
Yeah. Happy New Year, David. Happy New year, listeners. And I'm not going to be embarrassed about the number of episodes last year. I'm going to be proud that we're on episode 134 and we have yet, in the entire reign of the podcast, not misnumbered an episode. I think that's a bit of a record for a podcast that goes that long.
David Provan - cohost [1:16 - 1:17]
So it's not bad.
Drew Rae - cohost [1:17 - 1:21]
Let's just be proud we've got this far and we will continue to inch forward episode by episode.
David Provan - cohost [1:21 - 1:44]
We did almost make a mistake with today's episode, Drew. So, Drew, we came close. So, Drew, today, I don't think we've done too much discussion on the podcast about psychosocial safety, but I'm looking forward to today's discussion. It's sort of. It's an increasingly relevant aspect of safety in society and in organizations. Yeah. So do you want to sort of start us off with a bit of general discussion and then narrow us down.
Drew Rae - cohost [1:44 - 3:07]
To the paper so we've got international listeners and I do think that this is a bit of an international trend, but it's been particularly big in Australia the last couple of years due to changes both in legislation and the way some of the state regulators are interpreting existing legislation and duties. But essentially it's the expansion of safety to make sure that it covers not just physical injury, but also psychosocial injury. Got to be a little bit careful in terms here. So psychosocial is to do with harms that come about through interaction between people. So you're talking about things like stress, you're talking about things like bullying, discrimination, and how those impact on the psychological well being of employees. It's related to, but not the same as, psychological safety. Psychological Safety is that part of safety culture, which refers to an environment in which people feel able to do things like speak up for safety or to challenge safety or to feel comfortable making changes in the workplace. So psychological safety is about the environment. Psychosocial safety is about the impact of the environment on people's health and wellbeing. And those characterisations work for the purpose at least of today's episode.
David Provan - cohost [3:07 - 4:09]
Yeah, I think it's important these two are different. Related in some ways, but different. And I think today we're talking about psychosocial safety, which is harm that potential workplace behaviors that people are exposed to create for them as individuals. And so, Drew, maybe to introduce the paper. The paper title that we're going to be reviewing is titled Not Just A Women's Experiences of Workplace Humour in the Australian Construction Industry. The authors are Helen Lingard, Rita Zhang and Katie Chan. They're all from RMIT in Melbourne. True, Helen, she's one of Australia's leading construction safety academics. She's just established the SHINE Network, which is the Safety and Health Innovation Network in partnership with the CSRA in Colorado. I think we probably mentioned her a few times on the podcast, Drew, but it turns out we've only reviewed one previous publication, all the way back in episode 35 on leading indicators in the Construction industry. Drew, anything you want to sort of share about the authors?
Drew Rae - cohost [4:09 - 5:41]
I think that pretty much covers it. Hopefully as we talk about authors on the podcast, you'll get to get a bit of a sense of how the safety academic community is networked. So, you know, you can imagine David is sitting down there in Melbourne. The construction safety group at RMIT is one of the key groups in Melbourne. They are linked to the construction safety people with Matthew Hallowell's group over in Colorado. And then even though they're construction safety, of course that makes a broader contribution to the understanding of safety linking into other groups around Australia. And so, yeah, it's not the case that like every academic who works in safety knows each other, but we do have all of these links, not just through co authorship but through things like, you know, examining PhDs each other's work and trying to build off each other's work. And this group that Helen Lingard leads is one of the now like longest standing and most robust contributions to safety coming out of Australia. They've been consistently doing good work under different names for decades now. This particular paper is 2025, so very recent in the Journal of Management in Engineering. I think this is the first one we've done from this Journal. It's one of these very broad scope journals. You know, as you might imagine, management in engineering covers a huge number of things. It's kind of limited to civil engineering, but within that it deals with HR issues, leadership issues, safety management, project management. Broad scope but very solid.
David Provan - cohost [5:41 - 5:56]
Andrew, you mentioned our success rate in numbering podcasts at the start. This might have been the first time in 134 episodes that you actually had to reach out to the author to ask for a copy of the paper. So it might be a hard one for some of our listeners to get their hands on if they want to read it.
Drew Rae - cohost [5:56 - 6:25]
Yes. So one strike against the journalist. Management engineering is they're not published by one of the big publishers, they're published by the acse, which tends to maintain tighter paywalls around their stuff. So either you subscribe to it or you're not. And so yes, but fortunately very reputable author, very well networked, was very happy to give us a copy of the article when we asked. And you tend to find that is authors are very happy to share copies of articles if you need them.
David Provan - cohost [6:25 - 6:44]
So we're looking at, I guess the topic for today is the psychosocial harm or impacts on women in construction workplaces being exposed to humor. And so let's. So we're going to dig into this topic and Drew, but do you want to sort of talk a little bit about the research aim, what were the researchers trying. Trying to do? And then we'll talk about what they did and what they found.
Drew Rae - cohost [6:44 - 10:04]
Sure. So little bit of context. We've talked a bit about the changes in regulation and approach dealing with psychosocial safety. At the other end we have the fact that the construction industry in Australia has an extreme skills shortage. Even just like building houses or building an extension house is becoming more and more expensive just because it's getting harder and harder to find people. And that only gets worse when we have big infrastructure projects as well, sucking up skilled people into those projects. We have the Olympics about to kick off their construction in Brisbane. And when you're dealing with a skills shortage, it's a bit of a problem if half of the population is not available to you. And we are literally here talking about half the population because the construction industry is so male dominated that you're looking at like 3% of tradespeople are women. So there's a massive opportunity to expand the skilled workforce if it was more gender balanced. If there are women in construction, they're very seldom in trades. They tend to be in either management admin or Specialist roles, which interestingly include safety professionals. So if you like find a woman in construction, there's a good chance she is actually either management or doing something like safety. We've got all of these attempts to fix the problem from the top down. We have government programs, we have rules, both federally and a number of states that you mandate certain numbers of women be included in projects that are paid for by the government. We have strict laws against gender discrimination, workplace bullying, harassment. And from the commercial side, lots of companies care about this as well. So they've got their own internal programs. They look for things like external accreditation as employers of choice, which means they're having their policies and practices audited. So all of these structural and systematic attempts to change the problem. But what's happening on the ground and the experience of women actually at work is completely different. And regular listeners will see that this is the classic problem we're looking at all the time. You know, work as imagined through our policies, procedures, rules and systems. And work as it's done or work as it's experienced tends to not match those formals. So what does it look like on the ground? None of this is going to be surprising. And I think that kind of makes it worse that this is not surprising. Women in construction consistently experience discrimination and outright hostility. Various different research puts the numbers slightly differently, but they're all bad. So one 2022 study found that 95% of women in the construction industry feel that they're treated differently because they're gender. 60% report that they face inappropriate and challenging behaviour and are not supported by their co workers, their supervisors, their employers or their youth. A different study said that 88% of women experience small acts that make them feel less welcome, less valued or less safe. Microaggression through hostile verbal interactions. 80% of people and also other studies showing that this isn't just discrimination. This is something that has negative effects on women. It affects their wellbeing, it affects their confidence, it affects their willingness to participate in this workforce.
David Provan - cohost [10:05 - 11:31]
And so Drew, the surprising. Well, the unsurprising piece, like you said, is I think our listeners who are in some of these types of organizations and industries will relate. Hopefully we have a good gender balance in our listener community. And I guess unfortunately some of our listeners might have even experienced their own examples of this in their careers. And I think in organisations that workers imagined work has done. Like you said, Companies talk about 50% female participation in the workforce by say 2030. It might be part of their ESG sustainability related targets. They might even have Balanced gender boards and executive teams. They might believe that they're creating a great culture, they've got company values. But I think this study really highlights the fact that how well do we know what actually happens on the ground and people's experience of that? And we're going to talk through this episode when we talk to the findings about just hesitancy to report. And so most organizations probably don't even have the information that they need to know how this problem plays out in their organization. And also like the fact we're going to talk a little bit about a slightly different angle because it's not so much bullying and harassment, but it's this studies through the lens of humor. So this gives, I guess, you know, sometimes people and their behavior maybe feel like, well, it's just a joke. And that's why I like the title of this paper as well. You know, it's not just a joke. So, Drew, I guess, do we want to lead into what the researchers did in this study?
Drew Rae - cohost [11:31 - 14:01]
Yeah. So I really love the angle that we are particularly looking at the issue of humour and how humour is used to label or describe what's going on. And I think that is kind of an important insight because what we really need to understand is all these things we described shouldn't be happening in the sense that we know it's wrong. We as a society pretty much agree that it's wrong. A lot of those things are quite literally against the law. There are, like, laws set up to protect them. There are bodies set up to enforce them. There are rules within the companies. And so the fact that it is still happening suggests that there are like, social forces at the front line that are interfering with those policies working as intended. So how do we get at this? We need to actually talk to the people who are experienced. There are two layers to this study. It's what you call a sequential mixed methods. Sequential meaning we use one method and then we use that method to inform the next method. This can happen in both directions. Sometimes what we do is we do sort of deep qualitative stuff and then turn that into a broader survey in order to understand how widespread it is. This study is doing the opposite. What it's doing is using a survey to get the big picture and then using interviews to understand what's really going on with those survey results. Relatively big survey. It was sent out to 8,000 different organizations. They got back over 400 responses. I think it's almost telling to start with that this was specifically a survey for women and 20% of their responses were from men. I'd love to know what those men said, whether they were, like, having a go at the survey or whether they were just trying to support the problem. But they had 37 responses from the people that they were looking for, which is you. People who fully completed the survey, who were women in construction. And the makeup of those responses, pretty much not exactly, but close enough matched the sort of distribution in the different types of role. So, as expected, 30% of the responses were from managers, another 20% were from professionals, 26% were clerical. So that's, you know, women in construction tend to be in those sorts of roles. Only 30% of the responses were from people who are in trades. 10%. Sorry. Yeah, 30. 10 were machine operators or drivers, and 15% were labor. So not actually that many very frontline respondents, but that's what you'd expect because there are very few of those people.
David Provan - cohost [14:01 - 14:33]
Yeah, and I think this is one area that's not so much maybe a limitation, but more just to understand. Like you said, it's, you know. But I'd be really curious about those 30 responses, which is 10% of the overall response rate for the people who are in the trades, because it may be different if you're in the trade team than if you're the administration or the safety person or. There's already a dynamic that plays out between workers and their managers as well. So it'd be really interesting to see that. Is it role relationship or gender relationship? And how do these two work together?
Drew Rae - cohost [14:33 - 14:58]
Yeah, they certainly got into that in the qualitative interviews that happen later on. It's not really appropriate with that many responses to start dividing them up into small groups because the groups start to get very small. So they did the right thing in sort of analyzing the big statistical picture here and getting like 50 responses from the front line is pretty good. David, should we talk just a little bit about the sort of theory going into this before we talk about the actual findings?
David Provan - cohost [14:58 - 15:07]
Yeah, because we've talked about this angle, coming at it from. From humour. But it'd be good to talk a little bit about, you know, the. The way that we frame humor and, you know, what we're sort of talking about here.
Drew Rae - cohost [15:07 - 18:37]
So they come into it saying, like, okay, humour is not a bad thing. Humour is, in fact, sort of like a fundamental part of society. It's a lot of the way that we communicate and we build relationships. And that's true in the workplace as it is anywhere else. When you want to study humor, you need to understand that humor is a form of communication. With any form of communication, you need to sort of consider both the intent of the person who is trying to communicate, but also how it is received by the other person. Both of those are relevant and important and usually a little bit different. It's kind of hard to unpack. Like, what exactly is humour? People have been trying to define that in philosophy for literally millennia. But broadly speaking, humour is communication that has some sort of psychological purpose to it. That can be quite a few different things. In the workplace, it can be stress relief, so you're just joking around to have fun, to relieve the tension. It can be subversive, trying to challenge authority. You know, workers can use humour as a way of sort of subtly expressing discontent. Humour can also be used to reinforce norms and rules. It can be a less confronting way to pull people into line and to enforce that this is what's expected of them, this is what's supposed to happen. It can create identity and create shared identity. That can be good and bad, because shared identity can also be like a form of control. Some of the sort of, like, more nefarious uses of humour, it tends to be used a lot to establish and reinforce in groups. The existence of an in group automatically means that there's an out group. Humour is used to reinforce power hierarchies. Humour can be used to value people, humour can be used to devalue. So lots of things that humour does. But the underlying point here is that humour isn't actually ever just, you know, it's never just joking. There's always something that you're trying to achieve here, and that thing that you're trying to achieve needs to be thought about and studied. There's a big difference between I'm making a joke to make you feel happy and welcome and I'm making a joke to put you down. The thing to focus on there is not that I'm making a joke, it's whether I'm trying to make you happy or whether I'm trying to exclude you. Those are two quite different cyclonic intents. And then. And then at the receiving end, you know, how humour is received can be very different from what's meant. Being the object of humour can result in feeling included, but it can also feel like alienated or excluded. It can reduce people's confidence. People can change their behaviour to try to avoid being a target of humour. People can try to avoid situations where they feel that there are jokes being made through them or about them, and they can try to avoid those sorts of situations. So yeah. So before we get into the final results, the main thing just here is to understand that if we want to look at humour, we need to understand what's the, like, underlying motivation of that humour and how is it being received. And quite often in a workplace, a humour is actually a deliberate attempt for the person making the joke to sort of like, create or maintain a position of superiority over the person who is receiving the joke. Your humour is a friendly, or at least on the surface friendly attempt to say, I am above you. And as we're going to see in a moment, that's particularly the case if a supervisor is making a joke to the person that they are supervising. It's never just a joke. It is always part of that power relationship being exerted through the form of the humour.
David Provan - cohost [18:38 - 19:12]
So I guess the theoretical contribution here, and I know we haven't talked about the findings yet, is obviously the existing body of work around workplace humor suggests that humour used in the workplace has an underlying sort of psychological motivation. Like what you're saying, Drew, and the big takeaway, or one of the big sort of takeaways here is that it's felt that this humor directed towards gender in the workplace is a sort of a deliberate attempt for males in this workplace to maintain sort of superiority or control or over. Over females in this industry.
Drew Rae - cohost [19:12 - 20:04]
Yeah, we need to be a little bit careful with words like deliberate. And the authors point this out that something can have a purpose without the person with that purpose being fully conscious of what they're doing. So it may be that if we were to directly interview the people making the joke, even if they were being honest with us, they might still deny that that's what they were doing. But if we were to, like, study what's happening in the context and able to, like, truly read their subconscious, that is what they're doing. And got to be very careful when you're doing that sort of thing. And so that's why the author's a bit more careful here, that what they're really doing is looking at the recipients of the humour. So the effect of the humour, rather than trying to read too much into the intent, because ultimately it is the effect that matters when we're trying to manage harm. It doesn't really matter if your purpose of having a control was to try to protect people, if your control is killing people.
David Provan - cohost [20:04 - 20:10]
Do you want to sort of describe the survey and some of the key findings from the survey phase of the research?
Drew Rae - cohost [20:10 - 21:50]
Yes. So there's a couple, like, they're looking at a few different things. Some of them are looking directly at sexual harassment and feelings of sexual harassment. Some of the questions are more looking at humour and different types of humour and the characteristics of the humour. And then specifically there are a couple of open questions where they got people to sort of define when do you cross that line? When does it go from being humour that you think is okay to humour that you think is harmful or that you don't want to happen? And getting people to describe what that looks like in your open text field responses. So the findings about harassment and harm are sadly not that interesting or surprising. 65% of the survey responses had experienced some form of sexual harassment at work. Nearly half of them had co workers who'd heard people make comments of a sexual nature about another woman or a woman in front of them. More than a third had heard co workers talking about their sex lives. More than a third had heard people making unwelcome jokes of a sexual nature. A third respondent directly comments of a sexual nature about their own body and clothes. A third with unwelcome verbal sexual advances. So, you know, these are numbers that should in our ideal workplace be zero. Because remember, key thing here is we're talking about unwelcome. So we're not talking just about, you know, is this okay, flirting? These are people who are having things consistently happen that they don't want to happen to them. So what is it about the ones that were seen to cross the line?
David Provan - cohost [21:50 - 22:41]
Drew, I think this is just. If I can jump in, this is the interesting bit because this is where we get a survey that we now move away from the quanticit, quantitative statistics. And I think what we're going to talk about is how do we know where that line is? Like, how do I know what's unwelcome for another person? And we're going to talk a little bit about the difficulty in policy and procedure in this space because maybe it is more in an area of gray. So in this question, I just had an open box and asked the respondents of the survey to say, tell us about where the line gets crossed, you know, because I think that's something that we need to, to understand. Clearly jokes in a sexual nature are crossing the line, but is all joking in the workplace crossing a line? So this is, I think the results here really help start to frame up, you know, what is not an okay joke in the workplace.
Drew Rae - cohost [22:41 - 24:54]
Yeah, and it's interesting you sort of said like, you know, clearly jokes of a sexual nature are across the line. And, you know, definitely working at a university Absolutely. Like, if I made a joke about sex in the classroom, I would have student complaints, and those student complaints would be held up and reinforced, and I would be disciplined for it. If I just started talking about my sex life to a colleague, that would be completely unacceptable. I think it is the case in Australia in trades that the norm is, at least amongst males talking about males, that this is more tolerate it. But what surveys like this show is that for women who are experiencing that, no, it is not acceptable. This is something that is immediately felt as hostile and exclusive and across the line when men start making sexual jokes. So, you know, that might be just a simple test that people should start applying. Like, is this joke about sex? Okay, probably not at work. But then we've got jokes that are sexist and discriminatory, targeting personal characteristics, like physical, like, sorry, I don't even accept that that one's a joke. If you, like, start pointing out, like, the big butt of the person you're working with, that's not a joke anymore. That's just like outright bullying. Things that start to target someone's personal life about their family, their private life. Making jokes about the sexual harassment training and then directing those jokes at the people who are around you. Like, now you're actually like, almost like telling the people around you that the protective systems, they shouldn't feel safe by them because, you know, your supervisor is with the clients joking about the sexual harassment training, saying that, you know, they're not going to listen to it, they're not going to follow it. Yeah, people just like outright saying, hey, show me your tit. That's not a joke. That's direct harassment, detrimental effects. So respondents feeling embarrassed made them avoid situations at work. And when we talk about avoiding situations, we're talking like not going to meetings, not going to training courses, not going to particular places on site in order to avoid the particular person who is making those. So, you know, we're talking about someone who's like, feeling the need to carefully work out who's going to be at this meeting before I decide whether to attend it. That's pretty bad.
David Provan - cohost [24:54 - 25:27]
So, Drew, I think this, this research sort of clearly has found, you know, this, the prolific nature of this behavior and obviously some of the examples of that. And, you know, and this, this idea that, oh, well, it was only a joke, you know, seems to be a bit of a defense that we use, which is why I think the humor angle is really interesting. So after they did, after we got all these survey or not, we, after Helen and the team got all these survey responses, they then went and did 19 interviews. Should we start talking about what they learned through those?
Drew Rae - cohost [25:27 - 25:35]
Yeah. And this is, I think, where it starts to get interesting. David, I've been talking a lot. Do you want to, like, take this first one about humor being subjective?
David Provan - cohost [25:35 - 26:24]
I think this idea I mentioned a little bit about a bit of a gray area. You know, I can tell a knock, knock joke and everyone finds it funny. And my purpose of that is just to, you know, have a bit of fun with the team and, and that's fine. And I don't think there's, you know, maybe gender isn't the determinant of whether people think it's, it's funny or not. But when we start getting, you know, gender orientated joking, and it doesn't just have to be sexual related joking, it can just be if, you know, a female member of the workforce turns out five minutes late and, you know, maybe someone makes a joke about doing their hair or something like that. So this gender orientated joking is where we're really trying to understand. And I think the, the first part here is about, it's subjective and ambiguous. You know, I don't think there's common aligned agreement on what I just described is, you know, what is, what is okay and what is kind of not okay.
Drew Rae - cohost [26:24 - 28:01]
Well, what I find particularly interesting though is consistently, and this came out in the survey, but also deeper in the interviews, what the participants are saying is that's not an excuse, that's actually deliberately used as cover for things that are more nefarious. So what people are doing is they're saying things in joke form so that they can get away with it and so that they can later say, I didn't really mean it. But the question you've got to ask is if they didn't really mean it, why did they say it in the first place? If only 3% of the tradies are women, why are all the jokes about being late and doing your hair directed at those 3% of women? Why aren't 97% of the jokes about what the guy was doing in the shower that morning that made him late? Why are they targeting the women? And why are these jokes predominantly about that? And the answer has to be it's not actually about the joke for some other purpose. It's about the joke being used to put down the woman or to tell her that she doesn't belong. It's not about whether it's a good joke or not. It's about who is it targeted at, what's the pattern. Why are they choosing to say that? And the fact that it's a joke is sort of just like a way of plausible deniability for saying things that people wanted to say anyway. And it actually makes it really hard to complain because the person receiving it is thinking, oh, maybe it's well intentioned, maybe I'm just not getting the context here. I'm new. I don't know what a construction site's really like. Maybe I should have a thicker skin. And it takes them a while to realise, no, this is happening to me, but not happening to other people. And by the time they've got to that point, they may have already left or already like developed these avoidant habits.
David Provan - cohost [28:01 - 28:50]
So Drew, I think, you know that ambiguity, I think and reporting is that it's, it's. I think, I think it's very hard to think about how to like if someone directly says something to another person, you know, that's, that's harassment or bullying or something, you know, that's, or a direct threat or something like that. You know, I think there'd be some concern about, you know, if I go to human resources or if I go to, you know, a safety incident or something and I say, this person told a joke that I didn't like. How would an organization respond to that? And I think of all of the policies that I've seen in the psychosocial space and bullying and harassment, I haven't, I can't recall ever seeing humor mentioned clearly. I'll say, like, even if it's just a joke, it's not okay. But I don't know any organization that has really sort of helped people understand, you know, this specific dimension on psychosocial risk.
Drew Rae - cohost [28:50 - 30:50]
Yeah, and I think that is really the problem here is the way it makes it so difficult to respond to because the humour is used to like turn something that would be black and white if it wasn't a joke, it would just like be obviously wrong. Seems to turn it into a grey area that makes it hard to call out. If you do call it out, it makes it easy for the person to deny and dodge. And it makes ambiguous if you go to a third party because they sort of like they then worried like is the context. Are you misinterpreting? They themselves don't see it as black and white. They do offer a couple of useful almost tests here. So they're persistent so saying like, okay, you don't joke with strangers like that. So you know, if it's someone you've got a relationship with, okay, maybe you'd be more willing to like assume that it is well intentioned. But you know, if a total stranger starts making jokes about you, that is obviously harassment. That's not a joke. The second one they sort of bring up is like power relationships that a lot of this is underpinned by already unequal power relationships which also sort of starts to subvert the systems we have in place because quite a few participants said the person who was making the jokes about them was their immediate supervisor. Makes it a little bit hard to complain to your supervisor if that's what's happening. So it sort of like reinforces, yeah, reinforces that unequal power relationship, but also sexualises that relationship and makes it, you know, hostile rather than legitimate using of authority. But you know, people, if they're going to complain, then risk, okay, if I complain and it's not upheld. So in other words, it's a grey area. I'm not certain that I'm going to get backed up if I take this to hr. HR decides no, it wasn't actually a joke. And now my supervisor knows that I've complained about them and I don't get more work or I get kicked off the site or I get all of the shit jobs. So the, you know, humor makes it much more dangerous to complain because you're less certain that you're going to get supported and backed up.
David Provan - cohost [30:50 - 31:43]
And I think there's a, you know, particular examples like, and one of those trade based employees is someone actually working in these, these, these construction crews on the tools, if you like, you know, would just provide examples like that. The work colleagues, the male work colleagues would say, you know, shouldn't you be at home baking cookies and in the kitchen and stuff like that? So we really, you know, this is, this is not like I said at the start when I sort of said I was curious about admin roles and others and really wanted to dig into these trade, trade based experiences. It sort of seems to be right through all roles. And I guess, you know, people don't stop being who they are when they go into the workplace. So I think also what we haven't talked about, Drew, is just a broader reflection of what's okay and not okay in society, you know, outside of the workplace. You know, and I think there's a, there's a lot to be said for societal behavior that is manifesting into organizational behavior.
Drew Rae - cohost [31:43 - 32:38]
Yeah, there are quite a few comments here that just say like, just like talking about these topics at work is not okay. And that's kind of like A very abrupt value like dissonance there, because obviously the people who are talking about it believe that in some form it is okay, because otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. So you've got people working alongside each other where one person thinks, no, this conversation is an okay conversation to be having. The other person's just thinking, no, this is absolutely not appropriate. And I think part of what's going on there is if you have a workforce that is so male dominated, then it can actually get out of step with the rest of social media values that, you know, this is a really unusual environment, having somewhere that is just entirely young men supervised by older men. And it just doesn't get influenced by values. As society becomes more progressive, it sort of like, also allows these quite isolated, you know, toxic bits where people just sort of like, reinforce each other's bad behaviour and there's no one to pull them up and say, no, this is just not appropriate.
David Provan - cohost [32:39 - 33:36]
And so I think one of the more disappointing. I think you're right, Drew. I think having something that's 97% male dominated is different from many other aspects of social life. Maybe areas other than, like, in Australia, we. We learn through the media about the culture in, like, football clubs and things like that that are probably a little bit similar from a gender. Lack of gender diversity. But also, you know, the mining sector and the resources sector in Australia is. Is, you know, I think is. Is similar too. So I think. But one of the most, I guess, concerning pieces, even though, like you said, we have all of these policies and procedures and, and regulation in this space, is the feedback that the participants sort of adopt passive coping strategies. So this stuff isn't reported. So they either laugh along, they ignore, they avoid, they find ways to or leave the industry or whatever they need to do to cope, as opposed to feeling supported or change.
Drew Rae - cohost [33:36 - 34:56]
Yeah. And with a passive coping strategy, what that means is the system is not getting good feedback. So if someone is just quietly trying to fit in or avoid or leaving, they are not telling you that your policy is not working. And so you might actually get quite an incorrect impression of how well your policy is not working. They're also, like, not telling you how much harm they are experiencing. So they might reinforce the idea that, okay, this is harmless joking because you're not seeing the harm, because the person's just like, quietly avoiding it and not telling you how hurtful they are finding it. So it can lead to quite an increasing gap between how well we think our policies are working and what's actually happening. They didn't mention it in this paper, but something I experienced a little bit in the United Kingdom when I was working there is you have these like employer of choice and they've got these things called the Athena Awards in the UK that are like how well workplaces are doing with their gender inclusive policies. And I can only imagine how much, how bad it must feel if you like leave a job because of harassment and then they get an award. Yeah, it's like, you know, okay, on the surface their policies are doing so well that other people are patting them on the back and telling them that they're great. Just because people are not even able to share with you how bad things actually are.
David Provan - cohost [34:57 - 35:36]
I think we did an episode, it may even be all the way back in episode 18 on rewards in safety. And I think the conclusion of that work was that when you provide people with rewards that their performance gets worse because they obviously feel that they have, they're already overachieving and that they've got something sorted out. So almost any awards for this type of practice is probably not helping anyone because you're exactly right, like if I get an award for my gender inclusive policies, nothing to see here, nothing to, nothing to keep trying to get better. So do you want to talk maybe about some overall conclusions and then we'll dive into some practical takeaways?
Drew Rae - cohost [35:36 - 37:57]
Okay. So a few things that I found interesting. They sort of went back towards the end of the paper to reintegrate the findings with the theory that they had brought in. And what they saw was quite clear support for the idea that this humour is being used to devalue the professional contributions of women. And that's kind of interesting if you think about the fact that at the moment at least the women are largely in management position or specialized position. So in fact what this is is actually devaluing people who probably have more experience and qualification than the people who are making the humor in many cases. So what they're doing is they're like the humor is being used to subvert and exclude very valuable people to the organization and to reinforce this idea that this is a men's space where women don't belong in this space who sort of like come in as outsiders and stay as outsiders even when they're physically there. We're talking about genuine harm to wellbeing. So people who are experiencing, you know, psychological harm, this is stuff that is like claimableised work cover injuries that are happening. We're also talking about things like career harm because people are avoiding doing certain types of work. Going on training and development, going on meetings where they become better networked. So it's actually like you're harming people's career if not causing them to outright leave the organization and the industry, which is not good for the people and not good for all of these policies where we're desperately suffering skills shortages trying to get more people in. One thing that they mentioned it only from one of the participants, they didn't sort of was talking about being called the safety slut, you know, gender based stuff, but also directed at their role. And I think that's, I'd love to have seen that explored a bit more because I'm wondering, you know, safety is one of those specialised roles where there are more women than in other roles. And I'm wondering is that like also contributing to safety itself being devalued? If it is part of the construction industry that has more women and we have this gender based discrimination, this devaluing, does that sort of like have a cascade effect that actually devalues safety as well? Or is it kind of just like part of the same thing that you know, devaluing safety is already happening and it's getting lumped in together. Curious about your thoughts on that, David.
David Provan - cohost [37:57 - 39:02]
I think it's a fascinating research topic. I think, you know, safety roles in construction, utility mining companies are more gender balanced than frontline roles. I think that I don't have the statistics but I'd be very surprised if that's not true of the statistics. And so it would be really sort of fascinating to look at a, at a work site level, you know, male safety practitioners and female safety practitioners and you know, intersecting with some of this research and just, just trying to understand the experience of work and obviously the psychosocial impacts on, on the people and also you know, relationship role, relationship type impacts and you know, impact and effectiveness. Like I'd hate to think, I'm sure, unfortunately it does happen that you know, a safety professional or practitioner, their advice wouldn't be taken not on the basis of the advice but on the basis of their gender. Like that for me starts to open up a question that we, Helen, if you're listening, should probably do some, do some follow up exploration of how often do I feel like my advice isn't taken on because it's not good advice versus because of my gender.
Drew Rae - cohost [39:03 - 39:17]
And then we have the like avoiding particular places, sites, meetings, trainings. If we're like systematically driving people out of knowing what's going on in the organization and those people are in safety roles, that's A little bit worrying.
David Provan - cohost [39:17 - 39:53]
Could you imagine what it must, what it would feel like and like if you were, you know, obviously a female in a frontline role in a construction industry exposed to this humor that we're discussing and sexual harassment and then you had to go and attend a sexual harassment training course as the only female sitting in a room talking about how something's unacceptable that you experience every single day and sitting in that room going through that training like that. That's what I thought about when I thought about avoiding training and things like that. Because again, this work is imagined. Work has done. People coming in and talking about how the organization is when it's not the.
Drew Rae - cohost [39:53 - 40:02]
Way that it is, or worse, because they need someone to run that training. And you're used to running training sessions, you get to run that training and be catcalled while you're trying to delimiter.
David Provan - cohost [40:02 - 40:08]
Well, maybe you're the female safety practitioner who's running that training. Training. Right. Like imagine some takeaways. True.
Drew Rae - cohost [40:08 - 41:19]
Okay, so let's start with the obvious. The harms are real. So when we talk about expanding safety into the psychosocial space, however you might feel about that framing and whether safety people are the right people to be managing it, when we're talking about people getting hurt at work, gender based humour is a hazard. People are getting hurt at work through this type of stuff going on. Second thing, because we know that the fact that something's a joke is being used almost like weaponised to mask or shield what's actually going on, we need to just like get totally away from the idea that humour is an excuse. It's not. That's not like the question. The question isn't, is this a joke or not a joke? Wrong question to ask. Question is, what was the underlying purpose of that joke? Was it something that was trying to undermine? Was it something that was trying to excite or discriminate? And yeah, yeah, that's the question. Not was it or wasn't a joke. Irrelevant. Third one, if no one's complaining, get worried. We know it's happening. We know that people don't complain. So if people. Yeah, if you're not getting any complaints in your work site, that's not an indication that there's no problem or no harm. That's an indication that people are not feeling safe to complain.
David Provan - cohost [41:19 - 41:40]
Yeah, I think this is the ultimate, you know, safety is not the absence of incident reports. Right. Yeah. This is, this is clearly something that's happening to 50, 60, 70% of participants in this study and obviously representative of, you know, I assume, representative of the broader population. If you're getting no insight into this through any of your systems, then you need to go looking.
Drew Rae - cohost [41:41 - 42:40]
And David, I was already just a little bit uncomfortable that like two middle aged males discussing gender discrimination, which is just inevitable with this format of the podcast. But what I really want to know actually, because they were very careful in this paper to be descriptive, not to claim that they had the solutions. But what I really want to know now is what Helen and her colleagues think are the appropriate actions to take because they haven't included clear recommendations. And so the one thing I think we can say though is that when we're designing our formal policies and procedures, we do need to keep this very much in mind that a lot of this discrimination is happening via or under the guise of humour and a lot of it is happening via the supervisors. So when we're designing our policies and procedures, we need those two things, like will this policy work if it is a joke told by the supervisor? Is our training highlighting this as part of the problem and giving people avenues to deal with it that take into account the fact that it might be a supervisor claiming that it's a joke?
David Provan - cohost [42:40 - 43:13]
Yeah, I don't think organizations like to admit that managers might be the problem or even supervisors might be the problem. So a very typical policy approach will be report it to your supervisor on the assumption that it's obviously not your supervisor. Now we know in other forms of bullying and harassment, you know, there might be whistleblower processes or hr, but you know, we know that those reporting lines are challenging as well. So this may actually be somewhere where the safety team can step in and really help create ways of identifying where.
Drew Rae - cohost [43:13 - 43:39]
This is going on and possibly ways that are sensitive to the fact that it can be ambiguous. When you ask people to make a report, you're asking them to decide, yes, this has definitely crossed the line and is definitely reportable. And I expect that someone else will take it that way. Possibly we need reporting channels that let people say, look, I'm not sure there's a pattern. I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I'm worried it'll be interpreted as a grey area. So I want someone to help out here.
David Provan - cohost [43:39 - 44:16]
I think your contribution here on this is, you know, getting a little bit clear about crossing the line. And I think it really helps organizations because clearly humor is part of our experience of life. Right? And enjoyment and fun and. And so, you know, just having a simple, blunt, blanket policy that no jokes in the workplace, like, that's. That that's not the not the solution. But actually saying jokes are fine, but not these jokes. And I think this paper really helps us understand where we might be able to draw. It's still going to be maybe a fuzzy boundary, but it might be a less fuzzy boundary around what people can and can't joke about in the workplace.
Drew Rae - cohost [44:16 - 44:32]
Yeah. And like give people realistic examples rather than these, oh, I'm not the massive boogeyman, therefore what I'm doing is okay. So, David, the question we asked this week was, does caring about psychosocial safety mean that we have to stop telling jokes at work?
David Provan - cohost [44:32 - 44:46]
Well, a short answer from that last conversation is no, but we need to understand the underlying purpose of the jokes in the workplace and I think also create some understanding of what's likely to be an unacceptable joke.
Drew Rae - cohost [44:47 - 45:09]
So that's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought provoking and useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. We look forward to a continuing conversation with you throughout 2026, including both episodes from us and discussions on LinkedIn and other platforms. And you can send any comments, questions, or ideas for Future episodes to feedbackafetyofwork.com.