I rate Equinor highly in most areas of corporate ambition when it comes to net zero, support for its supply chain and above all, how it treats its staff.
At the recent Offshore Northern Seas (ONS) exhibition and conference in Stavanger, Aksel Stenerud, who is Equinor’s executive vice president, people and organisation said: “We believe in being an inclusive organisation that respects and values every individual, regardless of their gender, age, ethnicity, or belief systems.
“Our diversity and inclusion strategy is composed of several pillars, including diversity of thought, inclusivity, and psychological safety, and providing fair and equal opportunities for all.”
Last year, 35% of the leadership roles in Equinor were filled by women. This is up 5% from 30% in 2019 and has led to 25% of their Offshore Installation Managers now being women.
Equinor has also seen an increase in female apprentices to 40%, exceeding their target of 33%. Many of them work directly in operational roles in onshore plants and offshore installations.
Equinor’s spokesperson added: “I firmly believe that creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is not just about meeting targets and making promises. It is also about promoting empathy, building trust, creating, and fostering a safe and respectful work environment.”
This is something I agree with completely and always tried to implement throughout my own working career, which included quite long periods working in overseas companies, notably Norwegian and French.
The latter was in fact one of the first I knew to send women offshore. They were mainly programmers and electronics engineers looking after our data collection and data processing systems. That was in the late 70s.
Seen then as “revolutionary” in terms of the oil and gas industry, it caused a lot of excitement and protest and for many ideologically still stuck in the Victorian era it was unacceptable.
All the empathy, trust, and respect issues aside, it’s also good fun working with different nationalities, genders and age groups. Learning about different customs and picking up useful phrases in different languages is educational.
As someone who enjoys baking, I’d have never learnt how to make Ensaïmadas – a sweet bread from Mallorca – properly without having worked with Spaniards and I’m glad I could add it to my recipes because they’re very tasty.
However, if you’ve ever watched that wonderful film called “Hidden Figures” which is, albeit, not 100% accurate but a certainly inspirational story of three African-American women mathematicians working for NASA who played a critical role in astronaut John Glenn’s achievement of being the first American to make multiple earth orbits, then you’ll appreciate how far we’d come in dealing with both gender and racial discrimination even before the 70s, at least in certain sectors of society.
Now, we see it as entirely normal, and nobody takes any notice. Women have quite rightly simply become a part of the broader workforce and are playing the sort of role we would expect them to play in a modern advanced society where they choose to.
Hang on – does that ring true in the UK where the government has even abandoned rights such as “freedom of movement,” is now preventing students from going on exchange programmes and has a two-child cap on child support benefits? Are our hypocritical politicians out of step with industry?
Well, I’m afraid not because according to an OEUK Diversity & Inclusion Survey Report undertaken in 2021, women only account for 16% of the traditional energy sector globally, and in the UK, women in energy still earn 15.4% less than their male counterparts.
So compared to Norway, we seem to be underperforming not only in terms of the number of women in the industry but in terms of equal pay even Norway has room for improvement because the gap is still around 12%.
When it comes to the renewables or “new energy” sector then there are a number of initiatives already underway to try to deal with the gender inequality issue.
For example, the “Equal by 30” campaign is one element of the Equality in Energy Transitions Initiative, which is supported by the International Energy Agency and aims to “accelerate gender equality and diversity in clean energy transitions and close the gender gap by 2030”.
This quite rightly recognises that in those countries where the renewable energy sector is growing, their competitiveness will largely depend on their ability to attract and retain the right skills and talent regardless of gender or ethnicity.
Looking at some examples of companies in other countries whose progress I follow it’s obvious many of them get this already because they take great pride in announcing who is joining them on social media.
These younger companies are going to be fun to work in and of course, by making these announcements they’re making it clear that for them DEI is simply no longer an issue which is a great way of attracting even more applicants.
New energy should mean new ways of doing things. As the old energy industries fade let’s hope such practices spread.
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