As the 2006 President of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), I have been traveling around the world visiting with universities, oil industry executives, and our members. SPE has over 69,000 members, including 17,000 students, in more than 110 countries. Meeting with this broad range of people has provided a global perspective of the employment situation in the oil industry.

The industry has long recognized that new recruits were going to be needed to replace aging workers. Excluding student members, the average age of an SPE member is over 45. What wasn’t anticipated was the large increase in oil price creating a rapid rise in industry activity and high demand for skilled technical professionals. This has created an even more competitive market for young and mature technical professionals than expected. Petroleum engineers are in short supply in many parts of the world. However, there are areas of over supply such as in Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South America.

Recently, I traveled across North Africa (Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia) and also attended the SPE Middle East Petroleum Engineering Colloquium in Dubai, which was chaired by two women, Christine Ehlig-Economides of Texas A&M and Sara Akbar, who recently retired from Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) and is now CEO and Managing Director of Kuwait Energy. This colloquium focused on the Gulf region, but had attracted people from around the world. Indeed, the Gulf region is rapidly expanding its university level education programs.

As a woman, I am interested in female enrollment in technical disciplines and representation of women in the workforce. I was very pleased to see women well represented in the North African universities and to see that universities in the UAE were recruiting women for petroleum engineering programs.

Women have done particularly well in Kuwait. KOC has highly talented female executives and managers, who have demonstrated their effective skills regionally. Sara Akbar dramatically demonstrated to KOC the value of female workers, when she rescued the Kuwait oil well records during the first Gulf War and subsequently co-led the Kuwaiti fire fighting team. I have been very impressed with these Kuwaiti women, when I have worked with them on SPE committees on international issues.

Women hold positions of responsibility in other Arab countries. Tunisia has a female Director of Exploration and Hydrocarbon Production, Jamila Benhassine. At the meeting of the Libyan SPE section that I attended, Yosra Abugren, a young woman, who graduated from Libya’s Al Fateh University in 2003 and who now works as a reservoir engineer for Schlumberger, was elected to represent Young E&P Professionals on the SPE Libya Section Board. In Dubai, I met Dr. Zara Khatib, who is the Technology Manager for Shell E & P International Middle East Caspian and Asia Pacific Region. Based in Dubai and leading an SPE regional committee, she has committed to raising the knowledge and awareness of university faculty in the petroleum industry and to become a role model for female technical professionals in ME. Oman also has several impressive females including Moza Saleh Al-Adawi (Chief Operations Officer of Daleel Petroleum LLC), Abla Riyami (Gas director in PDO) and Fatmah Al-Kharousi Financial Director.

Clearly, women can be very effective technical professionals worldwide.

Unfortunately, not all women are getting the opportunities they deserve. At Cairo University, the top 20% of the students are well qualified. Major service companies recruit students from Cairo University to work around the world. Egyptians are welcomed as workers in countries throughout the Gulf region. Indeed, Egyptian oil companies complain that as soon as they train young workers, they are hired away by Gulf oil companies for five to ten times their salary. However, the Egyptian women I met at Cairo University privately told me that Egyptian companies would not even accept their resumes. She said that the employers “claim that women cannot do what men do, even though today's new technology eliminates the physical strength issues.”

The oil industry is a high tech industry. We do ourselves a disservice portraying it as a macho industry of stereotypical, dirty roughnecks. Young people are reluctant to pursue employment in occupations that require manual labor in harsh conditions. As the young Egyptian woman observed, physical strength is not a factor in success as a petroleum engineer. We would attract more people to this industry if we altered our image so that people envisioned petroleum engineers as building reservoir simulators and drilling simulators with state-of-the-art graphics.

Retention is a huge challenge in the petroleum industry today. If your company is one of the ones that will give women in places such as Egypt a chance, you may have a better chance of hiring the top candidates and keeping them.

Years ago, when I visited TERI Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi I was surprised by the large number of very talented women, who were managers there. My impression was that there were many more women at TERI in positions of authority than at the other Indian organizations I visited. My casual observation over the years has been that TERI has a high retention rate of its female talent. Indeed, if others are discriminating against women, and your company doesn’t, you have a significant advantage in hiring and retaining these valuable professionals.

If companies set aside their preconceived notions about the limitations on women’s ability to be fully effective technical professionals, they will increase the size of the human power available to them.

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