With stunning precision, Sara Saidman, an oil field engineer, can still recall the moment that “set the tone for the rest of my employment at Schlumberger,” a Texas-based oil field services company.
Saidman took a job at Schlumberger in 2016 because the company had a reputation for being the best in the industry. In her first week of working at a New Mexico drilling site, Saidman was sitting on a couch near her trainer Leslie Bullard, a large woman with a thick West Texas accent. Bullard slid her hand down Saidman’s left knee, onto her thigh, and grabbed her vagina, she says. Saidman bolted into her bedroom and hid under her covers for the rest of her night. Bullard declined to comment.
“There was no shaking what just happened,” she says. “She was in charge of my promotion, and I couldn’t even get away because we shared a bedroom.” At the time, Saidman was a 21-year-old woman surrounded by mostly male coworkers twice her age. A coworker told her that speaking up about sexual harassment tanked women’s careers in the oil field, so she didn’t report the incident.
