There were sev­en peo­ple on the stage when the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence held its “Next Gen­er­a­tion Lead­ers” pan­el dis­cus­sion yes­ter­day.

On­ly one was a man.

This, how­ev­er, was not planned.

It was the re­sponse from some of the key Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cers in the en­er­gy in­dus­try when asked to send their or­gan­i­sa­tion’s next leader.

“Just to be clear when we were putting to­geth­er this pan­el calls were made to the CEOs of these com­pa­nies and said give us your next leader. There was no dis­cus­sion on give us your next male leader or give us your next fe­male leader it was give us your next leader,” the fa­cil­i­ta­tor for the pan­el dis­cus­sion Pria Nar­i­nesingh the coun­try man­ag­ing part­ner of the EY Bar­ba­dos, East­ern Caribbean and T&T stat­ed.

The pan­el com­pris­es of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny’s (NGC) se­nior plan­ning en­gi­neer Can­dace Subero-Bai­ley, Shell T&T’s coun­try con­troller Si­mone David, BP’s sub­sur­face area de­vel­op­ment man­ag­er Katy Hen­der­son-Moses, At­lantic’s man­ag­er strat­e­gy and op­ti­mi­sa­tion Vashtie Ram­saran-Ba­ball, Pro­man’s di­rec­tor mar­ket­ing and lo­gis­tics (Trinidad) Han­na Sukhu Ma­haraj and Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration (Trinidad) Ltd’s ex­plo­ration man­ag­er Xavier Moo­nan.

“Do you think this is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of where the in­dus­try is go­ing? This is a change. Pan­els we would have had be­fore would have been op­po­site to this,” Nar­i­nesingh said.

Ma­haraj said she be­lieves it is.

“Pro­man is the per­fect ex­am­ple in this in­stance be­cause Pro­man start­ed pri­mar­i­ly as an en­gi­neer­ing and con­struc­tion com­pa­ny, a project man­age­ment com­pa­ny ide­al­ly, and of course it was tra­di­tion­al­ly a male ori­ent­ed or­gan­i­sa­tion and so fast for­ward 30 years lat­er we are the largest ten­ant on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate we are al­so the largest em­ploy­er in the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor and more that 27 per cent of our glob­al work­force is cur­rent­ly women and more than 23 per cent of our very se­nior lead­er­ship po­si­tions are al­so women. So I think that says a lot about where the or­gan­i­sa­tion and where the en­er­gy sec­tor is gen­er­al­ly go­ing “ Ma­haraj said.

“It is not to say our men have done a bad job,” Ma­haraj said as she laud­ed the male men­tors who helped her in her ca­reer.

“I my­self have been men­tored by some of the most bril­liant minds in the in­dus­try most which were men and that’s fine but if we are to get to where we want to be in 2050 we have to have a greater ac­cep­tance for the in­clu­sion and di­ver­si­ty con­cept,” Ma­haraj said.

Hen­der­son-Moses said di­ver­si­ty is not on­ly im­por­tant it is cru­cial.

“There are enough sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies that can show the cor­re­la­tion be­tween com­pa­nies that have a di­verse set of lead­ers and per­for­mance, it is al­ways a good thing to have more voic­es in the room more rep­re­sen­ta­tion for more ar­eas to help pitch new ideas and get dif­fer­ent view­points,” she said.

How­ev­er she warned that is should not just be about tick­ing a box

“Does any one of us want to be the to­ken fe­male?” she asked.

Hen­der­son-Moses said the BP ex­ec­u­tive team has more women than men on it and it is the first en­er­gy com­pa­ny to do that.

“It acts as a role mod­el to me to see those women in those po­si­tions so I can see that rep­re­sen­ta­tion so I think that it is ab­solute­ly im­por­tant,” she said.

Moo­nan said while there are not may women on drilling rigs lo­cal­ly, this is not nec­es­sar­i­ly the case in­ter­na­tion­al­ly.

“We see women work on all of the dif­fer­ent as­pects of jobs at the rigs it­self it does not hap­pen in Trinidad I have seen it in oth­er coun­tries around es­pe­cial­ly in Colom­bia and Pe­ru but it is not the norm here per se,” Moo­nan said.