An American Petroleum Institute study released last year showed women make up only 19 percent of the oil industry’s workforce. That’s compared to 47 percent in the overall U.S. workforce.
“It’s certainly something we’re very concerned about,” says Richard Keil, senior media relations adviser at ExxonMobil. His company hires a lot of engineers and scientists, and in the future, ExxonMobil wants a larger share of them to be women.
The oil giant holds an annual “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day.” The company also sends its female engineers and scientists to middle schools as mentors and instructors, “all aimed at getting [female students] interested in the subject and preparing them for taking math and science courses in high school that will help them study engineering in college,” Keil says.
The API report on women in the oil business projects the share of women in white-collar jobs will increase. But on the blue-collar side, the report’s authors believe the percentage of women will decline even further.
It’s not because women can’t do the work. Claire Kerstetter is proof of that.
“I never saw myself being out in the field, getting dirty, swinging a sledgehammer,” Kerstetter says.