From the dim and distant past, I remember seeing adverts in the local paper of my childhood for meetings of an organisation called the Electrical Association for Women. Even then, it struck me as odd. Was electricity not gender-neutral?
When that enlightened venture was initiated in the 1920s, it found difficulty in gaining acceptance from the mainstream professional bodies. By the time it was wound up in 1986, I suppose the widespread assumption must have been that such a gender-based approach was as patronizing as it was anachronistic.
Assumptions are not always safe guides however. When one looks at today’s statistics relating to gender balance at every level of the energy industry, there is little evidence to suggest that great leaps of progress have been made. In fact, there is probably no sector of the UK and Scottish economy in which women are so under-represented.
The dominant male culture starts at the top and works its way down. A very recent survey shows that, despite all the pressure for diversity on the boards of big companies, the energy sector remains among the most recalcitrant – for reasons that surely reflect the depth of resistance to change.
Of the top 80 energy companies in the UK, almost half have no woman on the board while 27 per cent have just one female member and 25 per cent have two or more. These are fairly extraordinary statistics which not only reflect the existing mindset of the industry but act as a block on progress towards anything more rational.
Every so often, there is a conference to discuss the challenges involved. In January of this year for example, there was a big “Leadership Conference for Women in Energy” held in London. The organisers were a Colorado-based consultancy which specializes in this sort of thing around the world. Evidence of domestic initiatives is rather thin on the ground.
The keynote speech at that London event was entitled “The Importance of Promoting Gender Diversity in the Energy Industry”, which is admirable. Not surprisingly, however, it was delivered by a man, John Pettigrew, CEO of the National Grid. It would be difficult if not impossible to find a woman in any comparable role in the energy sector, which really does seem a bit odd in the second decade of the 21st century.
The Colorado consultancy’s UK partner in that event was another longstanding outfit which has survived the test of time, called Women’s Engineering Society. It has been going since 1919 when “the pioneering women who worked in engineering and technical technical roles during the war campaigned to retain these roles once the war was over”.
The Society’s ongoing mission statement proclaims: “Our vision is a nation in which women are as likely as men to study and work in engineering and one in which there are enough engineers to meet a growing demand”.
So how’s that coming along? Well, not very well actually. The statistics have barely moved In recent years with women accounting fewer than ten per cent of the overall engineering workforce in the UK, which is one of the lowest figures in Europe. Meanwhile, female undergraduates on engineering courses represent just 16 per cent of the total – half the figure for a rapidly advancing economy like India.
The shaft of enlightenment may be penetrating some countries that it does not make any kind of economic sense to maintain such a high degree of gender stereotyping when it comes to educational and employment options. It does nothing but harm to our economic prospects that the dichotomy between male and female perceptions of what is open to them remains so extreme.
Oil and gas is probably even more gender imbalanced than the sector as a whole though, if it’s any consolation, that problem is not by any means restricted to this country. Indeed, when the Boston Consulting Group conducted a major survey of the oil and gas industry last year, one of its headline conclusions noted: “The consistency of our survey results across geographies…. despite in-depth analysis, we could not find any statistically significant differences in different countries or regions”.
It continued: “This consistency reflects the powerful influence of the industry’s current culture which is global in scope and strong enough to override regional differences. This culture will need to change materially if the industry hopes to make meaningful strides towards gender balance…..”.
The BCG, which had been commissioned by the World Petroleum Council to carry out the study, promised to “report every three years”. So progress – or lack of it – will be measurable. But one does wonder what steps are being taken within our own territory, particularly during a period of downturn, to recognise the issue, far less act upon it. The BCG’s study was entitled: “Untapped Resources: Promoting Gender Balance in Oil and Gas”.
So how do we go about releasing all these untapped human resources? Well, there is very little to suggest that it is going to happen on the basis of exhortation alone. In the absence of any more effective options, there is a lot to be said for a bit of positive discrimination at every level, in boardrooms, in employment policies and in access to higher education.
Whatever the arguments against positive discrimination, the reality is that it does make a difference – nowhere more evident than in the make-up of the House of Commons compared to what it was two or three decades ago. Whatever short-term anomalies or disappointments arise, they are outweighed by the fact that “untapped resources” will inevitably emerge.
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