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Thursday, February 20, 2025

Women making waves in the energy industry

by

996 days ago
20220531
The panel from the Energy Conference’s Next Generation Leaders panel from left Proman’s Hanna Sukhu Maharaj, Shell T&T’s Simone David, NGC’s Candace Subero-Bailey, EY’s Pria Narinesingh, Touchstone Exploration’s (Trinidad) Xavier Moonan, Atlantic’s Vashtie Ramsaran-Baball, and BP’s Katy Henderson-Moses.

The panel from the Energy Conference’s Next Generation Leaders panel from left Proman’s Hanna Sukhu Maharaj, Shell T&T’s Simone David, NGC’s Candace Subero-Bailey, EY’s Pria Narinesingh, Touchstone Exploration’s (Trinidad) Xavier Moonan, Atlantic’s Vashtie Ramsaran-Baball, and BP’s Katy Henderson-Moses.

ANISTO ALVES

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.


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