Women will emerge as game changers for oil and gas sector, says Gail India’s Ayush Gupta

“I foresee great roles for women and great contributions from women in the workforce, not just through their technical knowledge or expertise, but also with respect to diversity of ideas and thought processes – which are likely to be game changers... With more diversity in the room, there will be a diversity of ideas and of ways of working which is very important for organisations and will help bring out the untapped potential of women in a significant way,” said Ayush Gupta, Director - Human Resources (HR), Gail India.

Gupta was speaking at the virtual launch event of the ET Prime Women Leadership Awards 2023 where he highlighted the need for more women role models in the traditionally male-dominated oil and gas sector, by building a pipeline for a more inclusive and diverse talent, and by removing recruitment biases and misconceptions – at both the recruiter and candidate level.
“Apart from the oil and gas sector being considered very male-dominated, it is also perceived to be one with very tough working conditions, where people may need to work in remote areas and endure hard labour and tough, hazardous working environments in oil fields or gas fields for pipeline construction, or at refineries. So, that is one perception about the sector which keeps many women away from joining this sector,” Gupta said.

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Still, women are now slowly overcoming their inherent or internalised biases about the oil and gas sector and volunteering to take on tougher roles, said Gupta, elucidating this with the story of young women employees at Gail who are demanding more challenging roles and refusing to be relegated to taking on ‘soft’ roles.

For example, one woman employee at Gail, with two to three years of experience working in the fields, demanded she be offered an ‘equal role’ as the men, in either a refinery column or a cracker column, rather than a ‘softer role’. “That was really inspiring, not just for her and for us but for all the other women who are out there in the plant to be able to say, ‘Yes, this is what we can do; if she can do, why can’t we, and if some other male employees can do, why can’t we do?’,” Gupta said.

Building a diverse talent pipeline
A 2019 McKinsey article ‘How women in the oil-and-gas industry can fill the talent gap’ highlighted how despite several studies illustrating how companies are benefiting from diversity at the workplace, that women make up only about 15% of the oil and gas (O&G) workforce.

To understand the abysmally low number of women in a ‘heavy-lifting’ sector such as oil and gas, one has to understand that the disproportionate numbers start playing out at the level of plus-2 and the graduation-level educational system itself, noted Gupta.

Rooted in several sociocultural factors, often girls and young women do not opt for core engineering branches such as electrical and mechanical engineering, considered by many to be a gateway into the oil and gas sector workforce. This trend has a long-term effect and it reflects in the lesser number of women applying for roles in this sector. The road to equity in jobs is a long way to go as 70 to 80% of top-level roles at Gail, for instance, are core engineering-related.

The family and the institution have their own role to play in positively influencing young women to take up core sciences. The good news, though, is that slowly but surely – thanks to several science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) initiatives for girls and other marginalised genders – girls have already started outperforming boys in class XI-XII science streams.

To overcome challenges such as the disproportionate numbers of women in a sector like oil and gas, and overall, in women’s early exit from the workplace would, require long-term commitment from organisations to find solutions that remove entry-level barriers and biases existing in the system or during recruitment, as well as enable women’s rise to top management roles as many face what is commonly known as the ‘motherhood penalty.’

The key to this, for organisations across sizes and sectors, are pro-women policies. Case in point, Gail, with its drive to ensure women representation in recruitment panels to remove hiring biases, favourable policies such as mandatory maternity leave, and a flexible two-year childcare leave, which female employees can avail anytime till their children attain the age of 18 years. All of this is geared to encouraging more women in the workforce and eliminating the risk of exits.

Catch the full interview to hear Gupta share his insights into the future of the oil and gas workforce vis-à-vis women’s greater integration, significance and growth across the line, in sync with the diversity and sustainability agendas of organisations, and how Gail women have been gatecrashing the gendered terrains of leadership to rise as industry leaders.