GLOBAL WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
Gender equality study explores
barriers women in Persian Gulf
still face in oilfield careers
Industry has shown progress, but more
leadership will be needed to help women
enter field-based roles, upper management
BY STEPHEN WHITFIELD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
As drilling activity continues to ramp up
across the Middle East, the growing need
for a competent workforce also becomes
more evident. To fill this talent gap, many
countries in the region have provided
more opportunities in recent years for
its female workforce, allowing women to
take advantage of higher education and
industry-specific training.
Still, a gender imbalance in the work-
force remains . Texas A&M University
at Qatar (TAMUQ) and Northwestern
University in Qatar cited that as the key
motivation behind a recent study explor-
ing the obstacles that female petroleum
engineers face.
To gauge the oil and industry’s progress
on gender equality in the workforce – both
in Qatar and in the wider Persian Gulf
region – the two schools conducted inter-
views in 2020-2021 with nine women and
three men working in the industry. Based
on the personal experiences shared by
those interviewees, the schools analyzed
the findings and then provided recom-
mendations for organizations to help sup-
port women across all career levels. In
particular, the study called for more oppor-
tunities and encouragement for women to
pursue upper management positions.
“We’re trying to see what the challeng-
es are ,” Albertus Retnanto, Professor of
Petroleum Engineering at TAMUQ, said of
the project’s goals. “What’s happening to
women when they’re looking to get in the
industry, and what happens to them once
they get here? What’s the progress? Some
women have built careers here and are
starting to move up the ranks, but there is
a leak in the pipeline, and it’s important for
us to see why,” he said in a presentation at
the 2022 SPE ATCE in October.
Challenges in hiring
and in the workplace
The 12 participants who were inter-
viewed included field engineers and
managers working within the oil and gas
industry in areas like reservoir perfor-
mance and digital integration ; some were
also academics in the petroleum engineer-
ing field. Although not every participant
was working in Qatar at the time of the
study, they each had ties to the coun-
try, either through education or former
employment . Companies with employ-
ees represented in the study include BP,
ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, QatarEnergy,
Shell and SLB.
Among the top challenges the partici-
pants cited when talking to the research-
ers were a lack of policies or initiatives to
promote women into executive positions ,
as well as explicit discouragement or even
discrimination by coworkers and manag-
ers during the recruiting and hiring pro-
cess. For instance, female participants said
they had to deal with biased assumptions
and overly personal interview questions
that were irrelevant to their professional
capabilities and experiences.
Several participants in the study also
said they saw a stigma placed on women
who wanted to take on technical field-
based jobs. One woman noted that she was
frequently questioned on why she would
want to study petroleum engineering and
work in the oilfield, and was even told that
This graph from a 2019 McKinsey study shows that there is a lower percentage of
women represented at all career levels in the oil and gas industry compared with
other STEM industries. Representation was also lower in oil and gas versus the av-
erage for all companies in the study – encompassing more than 250 companies in
industries like banking, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and healthcare. This and
other findings from the study were cited in a 2022 report that looked more specifi-
cally at gender equality among the oil and gas workforce in the Persian Gulf. Image
source: McKinsey & Company, “How Women Can Help Fill the Oil and Gas Industry
Talent Gap.”
D R I L L I N G C O N T R AC T O R • M A R C H/A P R I L 2023
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