Oil world is not men's alone

Slowly but steadily, women are making their way into the region's male-dominated oil and gas production system, a process that may be helped along by expected skills shortages in parts of the vital industry.

Badria Khalfan, the first woman to become a senior manager of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), did not achieve her current position by mincing words.
"It's good to see technical people discussing human resources issues," was the opening of the keynote speech the deputy director of the human resources and administration division of ADNOC delivered to an overwhelmingly male audience consisting of the production and maintenance teams of GCC national oil companies.
The three-day meeting in Abu Dhabi last month brought together production and operations maintenance experts from huge Gulf oil and gas producers such as Saudi Aramco, Kuwait Oil Company and Qatar Petroleum, as well as ADNOC. For once, they were being asked to focus not on the mechanics of pumping oil and servicing heavy machinery, but on strategies to recruit and retain skilled workers.
Ali al Jarwan, the chief executive of Abu Dhabi Marine Operating Company (ADMA-OPCO) and chairman of the meeting, pronounced that the gathering would focus on "plans to know how to establish a well-trained, talented workforce and maintain it to guarantee the flow of work".
"This is an issue that receives the continuous attention of GCC governments," he said.
That is not a surprise in a region still largely dependent on oil revenues. GCC national oil companies are huge employers. ADNOC's workforce numbers about 25,000, while Saudi Aramco employs 55,000. According to Mrs Khalfan, however, many senior production managers at such companies have only just started to realise that a global shortage of skilled oilfield workers, from reservoir engineers to tool pushers, could profoundly challenge their operations in a few years.
"Having a skilled workforce is at the top of our leaders' agenda in Abu Dhabi. Within ADNOC, we're working within the same context," she told the meeting. "Today's generation is different from yesterday's and there is a need to set the appropriate strategies to adapt to such change."
One of the nuts that all science and technology-based industries must crack, says Michelle Valenzuela, a technical specialist at Dow Chemical, is how to recruit more women to fill large human capital gaps, especially in engineering.
To help its female engineers and technicians feel more valued and less isolated in the workplace, Dow has set up women's innovation networks in all the regions in which it operates. Its first "WIN" was established in North America in 1989. A Middle East network was launched two years ago from Dow's Dubai office. It now also incorporates female staff based in Egypt and South Africa.
"In the Middle East, women are starting to play a significant role. It makes sense because they are in an emerging market," Ms Valenzuela says.
A number of studies have shown that companies that include women in their product-development teams tend to be more innovative. That may be because women are often more plugged into the consumer marketplace than men, she suggests.
Even in the oil industry, where consumer preferences have little bearing on refiners' decisions to purchase crude, women can still contribute complementary knowledge and skills to a traditionally male-dominated workplace. For instance, mothers may be more acutely tuned in to safety issues than most men, and could speed up the crucial task of enhancing the oil industry's safety culture.
But how can Arab state oil companies attract women, especially in technical fields that in the Middle East, even more than elsewhere, have been dominated by men?
"Fire the men," jokes Mrs Khalfan. "No, don't write that down!"
On a serious note, she acknowledges the need for changes in corporate culture if ADNOC is to tap the roughly 70 per cent of UAE university graduates who are female.
Physical changes to company facilities are also required to open up a full range of opportunities for female engineers and geoscientists.
"Our offshore locations are not designed to accommodate female employees," Mrs Khalfan says.
But at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, an engineering-focused university that ADNOC has established in partnership with international oil companies and prestigious US and European universities, female students are already being trained to tend oil rigs.
Clad in black gabardine lab coats that stand in for the delicate, flowing abayas that Emirati women traditionally wear in public, seven young ladies are in a machine lab fashioning cylindrical lucite chambers in which to conduct fluid dynamics experiments.
"We are trying to simulate a cyclone inside a tube," says Ghena al Hanai, who is studying electrical and mechanical engineering.
ADNOC also needs many technicians to monitor and service its oil rigs, refineries and gas-processing plants. It has therefore established a technical institute south of Abu Dhabi to train Emiratis whose strengths are manual rather than academic in the requisite mechanical, electrical and instrumentation skills.
The size of graduating classes at the ADNOC Technical Institute has fallen since 2003, when the vocational college overhauled its academic curriculum to meet international standards.
Last year, the school gained internationally recognised accreditation from the Scottish Qualifications Authority for its mechanical technician programme. It now has a 50 per cent drop-out rate, however, as graduation is no longer guaranteed.
None of its students to date are female, although there are plans to admit young women.
That may become a priority as it is "not easy" to recruit the institute's full intake capacity of 400 students per year, says Peter Hardcastle, a senior academic adviser at the institute. This is an impending problem for ADNOC as its management seeks to boost the proportion of UAE nationals in its workforce to 75 per cent in 2014 from about 50 per cent now.
As of this year, at the Elgin School in Abu Dhabi, the company is taking steps to groom students for scientific and technical careers from a very early age, starting from primary school enrolment.
A similar programme will soon begin at a school near Ruwais, an industrial complex where ADNOC employs thousands of workers at its biggest refinery and petrochemicals plants. Next year, a third science-oriented programme will begin at a campus in Madinat Zayed.
 
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