NEWS

Whatever Oil And Gas Companies Are Doing To Recruit Women, It’s Not Working

By Lydia DePillis
Houston Chronicle

WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) If you thought the gender gap in the tech industry was bad, wait until you see the statistics for the Oil and gas industry where women make up just 14.5 percent of the workforce.

Houston Chronicle

The tech industry gets a lot of attention these days for being unfriendly to women, with sexual harassment seemingly running rampant and the small share of women in computer science declining.

Well, guess which industry also has a serious — and perhaps worse — gender gap.

That’s right: Oil and gas, where women make up only 14.5 percent of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 25.5 percent of computer and mathematical occupations and 47 percent of the workforce overall.

The reasons those gender divides exist are different across the two industries. But the remedies, according to a comprehensive study by the consulting firm BCG, are similar: Upper management needs to be dead serious about the problem, and convey it’s a priority to people doing the hiring.

“It’s not going to work its way out,” says Andrea Ostby, the head of BCG’s Houston office. “Just talking about it is not going to fix the problem. What I think we haven’t seen across the board is that rigor and focus.”

The study, which was conducted in conjunction with the World Petroleum Congress and included all of the major national and international oil companies, found that the already-small proportion of women in oil and gas worldwide are concentrated in non-technical, non-supervisory positions. That’s important, because being promoted through the ranks usually requires some field experience, ideally in engineering or operations, and many companies still consider separate facilities for women on well sites a “discretionary expense.”

Also importantly, BCG’s surveys and interviews indicate that women and men see obstacles to advancement totally differently. For example, when asked why women didn’t reach upper levels of management, women identified a lack of support and female candidates being overlooked. The top two reasons for men: There simply aren’t enough women in the industry to choose from, and women tend to be less flexible than men (which, other survey questions showed, is false).

“It indicates that the workforce doesn’t even really see that there’s an issue,” Ostby says.

But it’s likely to become a bigger and bigger problem, as much of the industry’s workforce approaches retirement.

Even today, companies are scrambling to find workers for active drilling areas like the Permian Basin in West Texas, and are still drawing on mostly men.

The Texas Oil and Gas Association, which represents many oil production and services companies in Texas, declined to comment on the study.

One way to convey to middle management that female representation is a priority would be setting baselines for female recruiting, and evaluating people based on whether they meet their targets.

Katie Mehnert, who runs an organization for women in the oil and gas industry called Pink Petro, says that’s the only way to move the needle.

“When you put big targets out there, people have to achieve them,” Mehnert says, likening gender balance to safety culture. “Just like when we said ‘zero incidents,’ people said ‘We’re human, we make mistakes.’ But we got to zero.”

Here’s the catch: Americans tend to react negatively to anything that could be seen as a quota.

While Europeans respond well to required gender ratios, according to forthcoming new research from BCG, Americans see them undermining merit-based hiring, worrying about the perception that women could be chosen over better-qualified men.

Ostby says that can be dealt with by setting goals that are enforced on a case-by-case basis.

“You don’t have to use them in a quota-esque way,” she says. “But what you can say is, ‘Hey, Mr. male manager, you haven’t promoted any females in the last five years, why is that and what are you going to do to address that?”

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