The March edition of Energy Voice is entirely devoted to the role of women in upstream oil and gas.
And on March 19 Energy Voice is staging a seminar at Robert Gordon University about women in the North Sea.
I’m rather hoping it will become a call to arms − a time when the ladies gang up on us guys and say: “Enough is enough. If you’re not prepared to take us seriously as absolute equals then you are fools unto yourselves.”
On various occasions over the past 25 years I have called into question the mess that is the incredible gender imbalance that prevails in UK engineering and among the many other highly trained professions that underpin our offshore industry.
Men dominate numerically at every level in the offshore industry, and this situation is deeply rooted. They command on the pay front too, apparently.
Around eight or nine years ago, I facilitated two women in industry conferences that were organised by the Society of Petroleum Engineers in an attempt to tackle the North Sea’s endemic gender gap issues.
Among those pushing the SPE hard on this was the unforgettable Ella Minty. It’s been a while since I last saw Ella but I know from Linked-In that she’s doing well and clearly hasn’t lost her edge.
Ella is a communications expert and had a lot to do with my being involved with both events as she knew of my forthright views about the stupidity of short-changing women. Remember they account for 50% of Homo sapiens; that is, half the available person power anywhere.
Back then, in Britain, I could name no more than four women who had smashed through the North Sea glass ceiling. Two were American oil company general managers and one of those was Patricia Horsfall of Oryx Energy, which was later acquired by Kerr McGee in 1998.
Thankfully there has been tangible progress since and especially over the last five years. But if you want to visit a country that takes the gender balance issue really seriously then travel to Norway.
And I’m going to single out Statoil for particular attention as there are now so many gifted women in senior roles within the company’s structure that I’ll be seriously disappointed if the next CEO of this most progressive energy group is not female, moreover appointed from within.
There is what I believe to be a powerful driver for achieving an equitable overall gender balance in Norway.
In 2003 the Norwegian government passed a law that requires 40% of companies’ board members to be women. In place since 2006, it stipulated dramatic regulatory measures for non-compliance. After an initial grace period of two years for existing companies, a failure to achieve the 40% quota would lead to the company being delisted.
That there are now so many women in Norwegian boardrooms is surely having a huge and growing influence at every level in business, including among the rank and file.
In December 2013, EV picked up on BP’s first Global Diversity and Inclusion Report, which recorded that more than 70% of respondents said oil and gas remained a male-dominated industry.
The majority of the participating energy professionals stated that it was “quite or very important” to ensure the industry was attractive to women.
According to Kirsty Bashforth, who was then group head of organisational effectiveness at BP, this finding was particularly relevant given that nearly nine out of 10 of the more than 3,000 survey respondents were male.
More than 60% said they expected the greatest increases in female representation to be among professionals just entering the industry and those early in their career.
Ms Bashforth said that there had been significant change in the gender balance of the sector worldwide and that women represented nearly 32% of BP’s hires in 2012.
“On the BP side, if you look back 20 years, I would say women were very few and far between at senior leadership level; and by 10-12 years ago we had about 9% at the most senior levels,” she said.
By 2013 this had apparently reached 17.5% at the most senior levels − the top 500 out of a company of about 85,000 people.
There was one woman in the top 10 on the executive team and two on the board.
Today, there are three women on the BP board and none in the top-10 executive team. That speaks for itself, in my opinion.
And yet, on its website, BP says of the current situation: “BP is almost three years into its stated diversity goals of 25% women group leaders and 30% women senior level leaders by 2020.
“We continue to make steady progress across all levels of the organisation and in engagement levels.”
I am not aware of further editions of the Global Diversity and Inclusion Report having been published.
OK, so things might have stalled for now at the top of BP, but there is now a broad scatter of talented women across the UK North Sea industry who weren’t there in 2013 and one of them is Deirdre Michie, who became CEO of Oil & Gas UK in 2015.
I asked Deirdre for a bit of help when preparing this. Off the top of her head, how many key names could she come up with. And here they are in no particular order.
Elisabeth Proust – Total
Greta Lydecker – Chevron
Terri King – Conoco Phillips
Colette Cohen – CEO, OGTC
Hedda Felin – Statoil
Nicky Etherson – Bibby
Vicki Thom – Bibby
Sue McDonald – HR director at Wood
Sian Rees Lloyd – UK country manager at Aker
Sinead Lynch – UK country chair Shell
Jacquelynn Craw – MD of OPOL
Susan Elston – Sodexo
Gwen Boyault – Schlumberger
Michelle Handworth – CEO Aberdeen Harbour
Jenny Junnier – AXIS Chair
Shirley Allen – Pinsent Masons
Clare Munro – Brodies
Jo Reynolds – BP – winner of OGUK Graduate Award 2017
Abbey Thomson – Shell – nominated for apprentice of the year 2017 and clearly going places
And there are more out there, which is great. But there remains a very long way to go before the gender balance in North Sea oil and gas is anywhere near where it should be.
Which makes me wonder what the situation is like in offshore wind, bearing in mind that that industry has become home to a growing number of North Sea refugees.
While oil & gas and perhaps the entire offshore energy business is in a better position than most other sectors of British industry, the odds remain massively stacked against women. Ridiculously so.
Ever heard of the Women’s Engineering Society?
I haven’t heard it referred to even once in the 27 going on 28 years that I’ve covered the North Sea energy scene.
WES celebrates its centenary next year. It was founded on June 23, 1919, by a small committee drawn from the National Council of Women, which was created during WWI to get women into work to release men for the armed forces. There are many famous names that became linked with it along the years.
And WES is deeply concerned about the staggeringly large gender imbalance that pervades industry in Britain.
The following bullet points are about as fresh as you can get and they make shocking reading. Little wonder slow progress is being made on the gender front of the North Sea.
A survey by WES last year indicated 11% of the engineering workforce is female, though at least that’s a positive change from the 9% in 2015.
On the other hand the number of women registered as engineers and technicians (ie CEng, IEng, EngTech) has dropped from 6% to 5% of the total.
The UK has the lowest percentage of female engineering professionals in Europe, at less than 10%, while Latvia, Bulgaria and Cyprus lead with nearly 30%.
Only 15.1% of engineering undergraduates in the UK in 2017 are women. Compare this with India: where over 30% of engineering students are women.
The proportion of young women studying engineering and physics has remained virtually static since 2012 while the number of women in computing degree programmes appear to be falling: 14% in 2010 and 13% in 2014.
Even worse is the situation with apprenticeships. In 2015/16 women accounted for only 6.8% of engineering apprenticeship starts.
Companies are apparently 15% more likely to perform better if they are gender diverse.
And, by the way, that self-same diversity is crucial for innovation including encouraging different perspectives and ideas that drive innovation.
So there you have it. I’m a lucky guy. There have always been talented, smart women in my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Us males really do need to wake up.
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