Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

The gap in the en­er­gy sec­tor be­tween men and women em­ploy­ees has al­ways been a Gulf apart, even with the gains made in re­cent years.

Deb­o­rah Ben­jamin is all too aware of that gap. She has been in the in­dus­try for the last 25 years, start­ing her ca­reer in the down­stream sec­tor with Shell and then Sol Pe­tro­le­um. She’s one of those women who found her­self in a male-dom­i­nat­ed en­vi­ron­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Agency (IEA), en­er­gy is one of the least gen­der-di­verse sec­tors of the glob­al econ­o­my. On­ly 16 per cent of the en­er­gy sec­tor’s em­ploy­ees are women, de­spite mak­ing up near­ly 40 per cent of glob­al em­ploy­ment. Fur­ther, ac­cord­ing to the IEA, wages for women in the en­er­gy sec­tor are al­most 15 per cent low­er than for men at the same skill lev­els, and less than 15 per cent of se­nior man­agers in the en­er­gy sec­tor are women.

Those glob­al fig­ures mir­ror the state of the in­dus­try in T&T. In 2019, an En­er­gy Cham­ber re­port cit­ed the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO), which stat­ed women make up ap­prox­i­mate­ly 41 per cent of the na­tion­al work­force. How­ev­er, in the en­er­gy sec­tor (pe­tro­le­um and gas sec­tor, in­clud­ing pro­duc­tion, re­fin­ing, and ser­vice con­trac­tors), women ac­count­ed for less than 20 per cent of that seg­ment in the work­force in 2017.

Such num­bers bring a strug­gle to women in the en­er­gy in­dus­try.

Ben­jamin re­calls, “You can stum­ble across an all-male board or an all-male man­age­ment or all-male col­leagues. Lit­tle things like ill-fit­ting PPE—as safe­ty wear still is not de­signed for the fe­male physique—be­ing able to use a bath­room when you’re on a site. These things are sched­uled with­out tak­ing sim­ple things like that in­to con­sid­er­a­tion, so when I go to a site vis­it, I as­sume maybe there is a wash­room around, but it’s ac­tu­al­ly a green field site out in the mid­dle of nowhere.”

Be­yond the phys­i­cal realm, Ben­jamin re­flect­ed on the “men­tal push­back” that was met­ed out to her by some of her su­pe­ri­ors, de­spite the com­pa­ny pro­mot­ing and brand­ing it­self as one of equal op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Yet, for this South girl, who went to St Joseph’s Con­vent, San Fer­nan­do, she would per­se­vere through the years in the en­er­gy sec­tor. In fact, the first ten years of her life in the in­dus­try were spent work­ing across the Caribbean as op­posed to here at home. She speaks of how the dif­fer­ent chal­lenges tough­ened her and forced her to sur­vive in the in­dus­try.

She start­ed her ca­reer as a sales ex­ec­u­tive, man­ag­ing the ac­counts of Shell and sub­se­quent­ly Sol Pe­tro­le­um for their re­tail sec­tor. When Shell sold to Sol Pe­tro­le­um, she head­ed sev­er­al mar­kets in the East­ern Caribbean, liv­ing in St Kitts for a few years be­fore mov­ing to the British Vir­gin Is­lands for 12 years. Her ca­reer had tak­en on a dif­fer­ent turn deal­ing with any­thing that re­quired fu­el from mega yachts to pri­vate jets and mari­nas to gas sta­tions to pow­er com­pa­nies and ho­tel re­sorts for cook­ing gas.

From there, Ben­jamin would kick on to the up­stream sec­tor. That, in it­self, would be a great ac­com­plish­ment. “Very few in the in­dus­try would have spread the gamut of down­stream, mid­stream, and up­stream, and I think that is some­thing unique that I en­joyed through­out my ca­reer to be able to see the three dif­fer­ent lev­els of the oil and gas sec­tor,” she told the WE mag­a­zine.

These days, she is ply­ing her trade in Guyana and Suri­name, which are both ex­pe­ri­enc­ing an uptick in oil and gas pro­duc­tion. “It is tru­ly an ex­cit­ing time for our re­gion,” she said.

Ben­jamin’s ca­reer in the en­er­gy sec­tor is a ma­jor ac­com­plish­ment for a woman who has not stud­ied en­gi­neer­ing. She stud­ied busi­ness man­age­ment at uni­ver­si­ty and would go on to do a mas­ter’s in in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness. She ad­mit­ted it’s dif­fer­ent from what tra­di­tion­al oil and gas em­ploy­ees would study.

She said, “A lot of peo­ple as­sumed that I was an en­gi­neer, but I didn’t go that route; I ac­tu­al­ly came up on the busi­ness side, which proved to be one of the rea­sons I was ac­tu­al­ly suc­cess­ful in many of my man­age­ment roles.

“Those net­work­ing skills, ex­pe­ri­ence in busi­ness man­age­ment and con­tract ex­e­cu­tion, which are not typ­i­cal facets of the en­gi­neer­ing en­vi­ron­ment, proved to be an as­set.

Ben­jamin said her ca­reer in the en­er­gy in­dus­try has proven that suc­cess can be at­tained even if it doesn’t look the same. She ex­plained, “With any sec­tor, there is no one path to suc­cess. There are so many el­e­ments that make up a suc­cess­ful busi­ness be­yond the tra­di­tion­al mind­set that peo­ple tend to have, you need to un­der­stand the big­ger pic­ture.”

Ben­jamin said her ca­reer in the en­er­gy in­dus­try has proven that suc­cess can be at­tained even if it doesn’t look the same. She ex­plained, “With any sec­tor, there is no one path to suc­cess. There are so many el­e­ments that make up a suc­cess­ful busi­ness be­yond the tra­di­tion­al mind­set that peo­ple tend to have; you need to un­der­stand the big­ger pic­ture.”

Ear­li­er this year, Ben­jamin com­mis­sioned and pub­lished a book ti­tled A Dif­fer­ent En­er­gy: Women in Caribbean Oil and Gas, with Ce­leste Mo­hammed. The book dives in­to how women dealt with chal­lenges with­in the in­dus­try. Ben­jamin’s own sto­ry is al­so fea­tured.

She wouldn’t be fin­ished there. While in Ja­maica in 2016, she re­ceived a call from Pres­tige Hold­ings to bring the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly renowned fran­chise of Star­bucks to T&T. She would go on to roll out eight stores in two years in what she said was a very am­bi­tious project.

For this avid read­er, her ca­reer’s work in the en­er­gy in­dus­try has made it eas­i­er for oth­er women to fol­low

“There were a few men­tors in my ear­ly days, not many, and then me com­ing up al­so tried to make a dif­fer­ence and set an ex­am­ple while al­so try­ing to use my voice as a plat­form to let oth­er young ladies know that this is some­thing that you can get in­volved in,” she ex­plained.

Ben­jamin has found much in­spi­ra­tion in Ín­grid Be­tan­court, the for­mer French-Colom­bian politi­cian, whose bi­og­ra­phy, Even Si­lence has an End, de­tails her men­tal sur­vival through six years as a pris­on­er of FARC in a Colom­bian jun­gle. FARC was Colom­bia’s largest ir­reg­u­lar army.

One of Deb­o­rah’s great­est joys is rais­ing her 18-year-old son as a sin­gle moth­er.