- Welcome to the webinar on Critical Challenges Faced by Women. In this webinar, I'll be giving a high-level view of many different issues that will be addressed in subsequent webinars. This slide provides a list of some of those issues. One of the serious issues facing women is isolation. And one way to look at the isolation, both as a function of time, is to look at the gender statistics of some of the professional society members. In this case, I show the data for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and you can see that in the older age groups the percentage of women is well less than 10%. Whereas when you get down to the women under 24, it's slightly in excess of 30%. So older women tend to have been isolated. How isolated a women is can depend upon where she's working around the world, and also her discipline and other factors. So when we're looking at this, the fewer female peers a woman has the greater her sense of isolation. What's the problem with isolation? If you're the only woman in a workplace, it's very hard to tell whether or not the reactions you're getting are because of your gender or because of something you're doing wrong. It can also be difficult to find role models or a confidant of the same gender within the organization. It's important to have a confidant within your organization because there are many organizational-specific things that someone from outside the organization may not understand. There's several ways to potentially mitigate this. One is that most organizations do have female clerical and administrative workers, and they're often very knowledgeable and observant and know a great deal. So they can provide a lot of advice and counseling, even though they're on a completely different career track. Another possibility is other female professionals, whether they're in law or accounting or other disciplines. Another option is that many professional societies, including the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, have very active women's groups. The Society of Petroleum Engineers is in the process of creating a stronger women's group. You can also join Pink Petro, which is a group dedicated to women in the petroleum industry. There are also general societies for women in STEM, including the Association for Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers. It can be hard for women to understand bias and to differentiate between bias and bullying. Women, particularly those of color or another minority group, can be suffering from multiple forms of bias simultaneously. Bias can be detrimental to your career, whether it's negative or positive. A classic example of positive bias is paternalism. Paternalism can be detrimental to your career. It's often a well-intentioned man who wants to protect you from something he wouldn't want his daughters or his wife doing. In limiting your risks, he can also limit your opportunities and therefore create barriers to your future advancement. In terms of negative bias, there have been multiple studies that have shown that if you take resumes and you simply switch the gender of the name on the resumes, both men and women will perceive the competency of the person whose resume has a female name on it as being less competent and deserving of lower compensation. A classic example of overcoming this is blind auditions that have increased the percentage of women on major symphony orchestras. In that case, the musicians audition behind a curtain, and they went so far as to have the musicians remove their shoes so that the sound of a woman's heels would not betray the gender of the person auditioning. Unfortunately, this is not possible in our industry. And so it's an impact not only at the point of hiring, but also every time it's a question of a promotion or a salary increase. The presence of bias tends to enhance conflict with supervisors and co-workers, and in turn that creates problem and a negative perception of the woman. Another issue is bullying. And bullying tends to increase when people do not have the ability to simply walk away from the bully. Which in this case means that jobs are difficult to find, it's not easy to transfer to a new position within an organization, or not easy to get a position in another organization. In this slide, in the blue curve you can see the oil price adjusted for inflation. And overlain on that in the red is the US oil and gas employment. What you can see is that when oil prices decline, the employment in the industry declines after that. So in times of low and falling oil prices, bullying in the industry tends to increase. One of the things that we've found in general, and in this case it was in a Society of Petroleum Engineers survey that I ran on attraction and retention of employees, is that women report in terms of changing jobs that they're more likely to have encountered a conflict with a boss or with co-workers. Women also cite inflexible work schedules much more frequently than men do as a reason for changing jobs. There can be multiple sources of conflict. Bias is one. Bias, as I mentioned, can come in many forms. Another is in the form of invisible diversity, which is lifestyle, which is the fact that a woman in the workplace has a different lifestyle than the traditional woman. If you often have a man who's in a traditional marriage with a stay-at-home wife who may believe that women should stay home with their children, they may also believe that to succeed and be an executive that you have to have a partner in a support role. It can come about the issue of the need for flexible work arrangements, when you don't have somebody providing full-time domestic support. Another source of conflict is jealousy. While women often perceive that the workplace is not a level playing field, men perceive programs to help women as reverse discrimination. And this can be true whether or not they have a working wife. Also, men may believe that women are less likely to be penalized for making use of work flexibility, whereas women report the opposite. There are also issues of women's communication style, where women tend to see more factors as being relevant to a decision than men do. And men may see that as not getting to the point. Another issue is a diversity of lifestyle. So when you have a diversity of lifestyle, that is a cultural difference that again can create conflict and challenges. What you see in this slide is the percentage of members at different age groups in the Society of Petroleum Engineers who report being part of a dual-career couple. What you can see is that female engineers are much more likely than their male counterparts to be part of a dual-career couple, but that younger men, particularly if you look at the trend between age 25 and 54, you can see that the younger men are much more likely to be part of a dual-career couple. Such that when you look at the 25 to 29 age range, there's not much difference. When you're part of a dual-career couple, one of the key challenges is career coordination. And I'm repeating again the graph here of oil price adjusted for inflation against US employment. And so it's much easier to coordinate two careers at a time when it's easy to get jobs. When it's difficult to get jobs, it's not only a problem initially getting two jobs in one location, it can be a problem of retaining two jobs in one location when there's lay-offs underway. And it can also be a problem if one person's relocated, finding another job within commuting range for the trailing partner. Another issue for dual-career couples is equitable division of household chores. A key challenge for dual-career couples is child rearing, when one person is not the sole person responsible for child rearing. Even in cases where both men and women are working full-tine, women still tend to bear a disproportionate part of the load. On top of that, there are family, societal, managerial, and colleagues' views and expectations of what womens' roles should be. And that can create friction. One of the things that often comes out is that men often advance more rapidly, get a promotion, get a raise. When they have a child, they're viewed as being more mature and more worthy of advancement. Whereas when a woman has a child, it's viewed as more of a distraction and it becomes harder for her to advance. So we need more equitable division of child rearing between parents. We need greater access to flexible work arrangements. And we need people to focus on performance, not on work hours, lifestyle, or maternal status. The female talent pipeline leaks at mid-career. Companies like to try to fill the female pipeline by emphasizing the front-end of the process. And so you don't have to admit fault if you're out there and trying to encourage young women to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Companies like to promote the fact that they have enhanced recruiting of early career women, programs to get young women into management. But the fact is there's a disproportionate amount of attrition at mid-career. And to truly address those issues, companies need to be more introspective and admit more fault. And so that's much more difficult and you see less of that. In this short period of time, we've just had a chance to do a quick overview of some of these issues. They'll be covered in greater detail in subsequent webinars. And here for your reference are some additional resources, if you want to do more reading. On the top is my new book, A Guide for Dual-Career Couples: Rewriting the Rules, in which I present many of these ideas along with some of the underlying research. Some of my underlying research is listed in these technical papers here, of the Professional Technical Society surveys that I've led for both the Society of Exploration Geophysicists and the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Thank you very much.