: Rebecca Ponton
: Breaking the Gas Ceiling Women in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry
: Modern History Press
: 9781615994458
: 1
: CHF 6.00
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 292
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

The international petroleum industry has long been known the world over as a 'good old boys' club' and nowhere is the oil and gas industry's gender imbalance more apparent than offshore. The untold story, shared in these pages, is about the women who have been among the first to inhabit this world, and whose stories previously have been a missing part of the history of the industry.
'As a CEO, I believe it is imperative for today's generation of young women to realize there is a seat for them in the boards of oil& gas companies as the 'gas ceiling' can be broken quicker and easier than before. Reading this book, they will think about these women who have gone before them and broken down those barriers in order to give them new opportunities.'
-- Maria Moraeus Hanssen, CEO, DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG
'My belief is that diversity is key to both creativity and solid long-term business results. Even in a country like Norway, where professional gender diversity is greater than in any other country I have had interactions with, we have an underrepresentation of women in top management positions. I would therefore like to express my appreciation to Rebecca Ponton for keeping this important subject on the agenda by presenting to us positive, impressive and, at the same time, obtainable role models.'
-- Grethe K. Moen, CEO and President, Petoro AS
'As the industry now is more complex and faces more uncertainty, women will be more important contributors, especially in management and communication. Women could be just what is needed!'
-- Karen Sund, Founder Sund Energy AS
'Everyone needs role models - and role models that look like you are even better. For women, the oil and gas industry has historically been pretty thin on role models for young women to look up to. Rebecca Ponton has provided an outstanding compilation of role models for all women who aspire to success in one of the most important industries of modern times.'
-- Dave Payne, Chevron VP Drilling& Completions
From the World Voices Series at Modern History Press

1

WOW – Women On Water:
A Brief History of Women Offshore

The first woman ever to work offshore in the history of the petroleum industry is… a mystery.

“Offshore” being a relative term, Azerbaijan staked claim to the first offshore oil discovery in 1803 with the extraction of oil from two hand-dug wells 18 and 30 meters from shore in Bibi-Heybat Bay (Zonn, et al., 2010), so perhaps it could have been an Azerbaijani woman.

Although it would be almost 150 years later, an Azerbaijani woman did indeed make her mark on the industry. Maral Rahmanzadeh, already a respected artist, rose to greater prominence in the 1950s for her renderings of life offshore on Azerbaijan’s famousNeft Dashlari (Oil Rocks) (Aliyev, 2011). Maral is said to have removed the traditional Muslim veil and donned a jumpsuit in order to work among the oilmen, capturing scenes of their daily lives (Nazarli, 2015). Perhaps not thought of as traditional “offshore work,” art plays a vital role in documenting life offshore and is carried on by contemporary artists like Scotswoman Sue Jane Taylor profiled in this book.

While women have achieved many firsts in the field – and continue to do so – it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty who thevery first woman was to work offshore. Because it is a worldwide industry, each country with a petroleum-centric economy would have had a woman who was the first to be involved in the industry whether she actually went offshore or remained onshore where she participated in some facet of the offshore industry.

Just as women were involved in the onshore industry from its inception in the mid-19th century when oil was first discovered in North America in Oil Springs, Ontario, Canada, in 1858 and in the United States the following year with the Edmund Drake well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, we have to assume women were involved offshore, in some capacity, from the beginning.

American anthropologist Diane E. Austin, PhD, confirms this when she writes, “Long before the 1970s when oil and gas companies were forced by [US] federal civil rights laws and guidelines established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to begin hiring women in offshore jobs, women were intimately involved with the industry” (2006, p. 173).

Despite that fact, not much was written about women working offshore in the US until the 1970s. Newspaper archives offer a fascinating glimpse into how the arrival (often referred to as the “invasion”) of women affected the previously all-male bastion of offshore oil and gas.

A brief article appeared in some US newspapers in September 1973, stating five women became the “first of their sex” to work offshore in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) when they were hired through a catering company to “take over cooking and cleaning jobs” on a drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana (no byline; 1973).4 The article sp