Can we flip the switch for women in energy?

This data includes all industries, but the picture in the energy sector is even bleaker. According to the International Energy Agency, women in energy account for only 16% of the workforce – less than half of the global average. This disparity disadvantages the energy sector, which stands to benefit significantly from the diversity of thought, approaches to problem-solving, and economic outcomes of including more women.

There is particular relevance to the energy sector and all engineering fields to address this gap. In her book, “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, Caroline Criado Perez highlights a less obvious ramification of gender disparity: how it affects data, science, and design. This poses interesting questions in the engineering sector, where data is treated as fact despite its inherent (if unconscious) bias. This bias has real consequences: more women die in car accidents because crash-test dummies assume male forms. What could the energy sector be missing from a lack of diversity in thought and design?

There are other benefits, too. Including women in the formal economy results in a disproportionate benefit to society as women tend to spend more of their income on family, social ties, and local economies. As women start to participate in engineering and STEM fields, their presence also becomes less stigmatized, and it is easier to organize policies and structures that benefit women, like childcare and safety measures.

While there have been various interventions to organizational gender empowerment, there are some pitfalls to the approaches that have slowed progress. The most common approach for organizations and companies is a “just add women” approach: setting targets and quotas for women in the workforce. While this is an important starting point to work towards better representation of women, research shows that, typically, one kind of woman tends to benefit from such programs: those that already have access to education, connections, and capital.

To achieve gender equality in energy, a robust and multifaceted approach is needed. Companies that want to address it must understand the intersecting issues and how to counteract them – from social impact programs to women’s employment and ownership. Lerato Shai, a feminist labor economist, mentions that looking at the purpose of gender empowerment programs and following up with a holistic set of measurements is important. Shai says that the first step for organizations is to understand the structures hindering gender equality in the relevant sectors, business units, and operational environments. This helps to identify who is excluded and what the barriers to entry are, enabling a clear-eyed view of the status quo before defining the objectives and desired outcomes of gender-equity projects.

According to Ifeoma Dike, Head of ESG at CrossBoundary Energy, the challenge with integrating holistic empowerment programs in the sector is often due to the nature of different project stages, as well as the business objectives of multiple players. For example, engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) companies typically have strict timelines and tight margins when building energy projects and thus place women empowerment at the bottom of the list of priorities. As such, short-term interventions tend to be favored, such as supporting local craft-making businesses, donations to existing organizations focused on empowerment, and similar. While these interventions still provide value, they don’t holistically address the systemic issues of women’s inclusion in the energy economy.

There are compounding issues to these struggles. According to Dike, societal norms and cultural practices in the African context often inhibit the involvement of women. This is stark in energy, where engineering or construction jobs are perceived as work for men rather than women. Dike also added that the remote nature of renewable energy sites poses challenges for safety measures and family responsibilities, further impacting women’s involvement. It becomes a vicious cycle of fewer women represented and, thus, fewer women pursuing such jobs and careers.

Approaches to effective gender empowerment programs in renewable energy

For renewable energy projects, it’s helpful to think about how more women could be involved in—and benefit from—different stages of projects. Development, power purchase agreements and legal matters, financing, ESG assessments, technical design, procurement, construction, commissioning, operation, and billing are all distinct functions in actualizing large energy projects. Looked at holistically, each project provides vast opportunities for impact at different levels and across sectors.

During the initial design and construction phase, engaging with women from the community, and women engineers, can identify some of the vulnerabilities that might affect their workers and local communities. Including women at various levels could enable adaptations for plant design that avoid areas known by the community to be dangerous, ensure adequate ablution and childcare facilities, and create procedures and grievance mechanisms that protect women on site.

Since energy assets have long-term lifetimes, programs can have a sustained impact once a plant is built and commissioned. From ownership stakes for local women to ensuring equality in maintenance staffing and supplying women-owned businesses with energy, there are myriad opportunities for inclusion. At the moment, these opportunities are underutilized.

We are acutely aware of the need for gender empowerment in the energy sector. Yet given the low margins, sector-wide policies and compacts can create a level playing field for businesses to kick-start their programs. As sector- and market-wide standards like the UN Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative have normalized reporting on social and environmental indicators, so too could an energy-specific set of gender empowerment guidelines create a baseline for programmes. Shai believes that these policies are not a “solve-all,” but they can be a catalyst in sectors desperate for a push.

Rethinking how we measure ROI for social outcomes will be a longer-term, more profound intervention. Currently, with ROI and success measurements bound to short-term outcomes and profits, gender empowerment is often placed at the bottom of the spending agenda. If measurements could adequately quantify the real-term impacts of these programs over time, businesses would be much more likely to prioritize the interventions that work rather than completing a check-box exercise.

Achieving gender equality in the energy sector will benefit society, businesses, and the sector as a whole. However, progressing from the current status quo requires a comprehensive and nuanced approach that goes beyond setting targets and quotas for women. Sector-wide policies and compacts can catalyze spending on these programs and ensure that no businesses are disadvantaged at the start, but a deeper understanding of the structural barriers and societal norms that inhibit women’s participation is crucial. By involving women at all stages of energy projects and addressing their specific needs, companies can have impacts on society and meaningfully push the energy sector forward.

Thank you to Lerato Shai, feminist labor economist, and Ifeoma Dike, Head of ESG at CrossBoundary Energy, for their contributions to this article.