Female Whistleblowers: Contributions, Motivations, and Society's Response
Summary
Whistleblowing is a relatively new phenomenon in American culture; it is only within the last thirty years or so that people who publicly disclosed irregularities in their institutions came to be known as whistleblowers. In very recent history, blowing the whistle has been applauded; that was not always the case. Whistleblowers often faced ridicule at work, the loss of their jobs, or worse.
Most whistleblowers have been men. Men comprised the majority of the workforce and certainly occupied most of the highest positions, where irregularities occur and can be caught. Karen Silkwood is the most well-known female whistleblower. Silkwood blew the whistle on dangerous conditions at an Oklahoma nuclear plant and may have been intentionally contaminated with plutonium and killed because of her courageous actions. This paper will explore the impact her life and death had on the anti-nuclear movement and whether her story influenced the imposition of stricter safety standards on the nuclear industry and passage of the first statutory protection for nuclear whistleblowers.
Karen Silkwood was not the first female whistleblower. She was simply continuing a long tradition of women using their differences from men and their status as outsiders to challenge the norm. The paper also examines whether the way women approach moral and ethical problems, the structure of male-dominated institutions and women's place in them, and women's different conception of success make them more likely to blow the whistle on impropriety in the workplace. Finally, the paper looks at evidence that responses to whistleblowers differ based on the gender of the person blowing the whistle.
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