Breaking the Gas Ceiling (eBook)

The first woman ever to work offshore in the history of the petroleum industry is… a mystery.

“Offshore” being a relative term, Azerbaijan staked claim to the first offshore oil discovery in 1803 with the extraction of oil from two hand-dug wells 18 and 30 meters from shore in Bibi-Heybat Bay (Zonn, et al., 2010), so perhaps it could have been an Azerbaijani woman.

Although it would be almost 150 years later, an Azerbaijani woman did indeed make her mark on the industry. Maral Rahmanzadeh, already a respected artist, rose to greater prominence in the 1950s for her renderings of life offshore on Azerbaijan’s famous Neft Dashlari (Oil Rocks) (Aliyev, 2011). Maral is said to have removed the traditional Muslim veil and donned a jumpsuit in order to work among the oilmen, capturing scenes of their daily lives (Nazarli, 2015). Perhaps not thought of as traditional “offshore work,” art plays a vital role in documenting life offshore and is carried on by contemporary artists like Scotswoman Sue Jane Taylor profiled in this book.

While women have achieved many firsts in the field – and continue to do so – it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty who the very first woman was to work offshore. Because it is a worldwide industry, each country with a petroleum-centric economy would have had a woman who was the first to be involved in the industry whether she actually went offshore or remained onshore where she participated in some facet of the offshore industry.

Just as women were involved in the onshore industry from its inception in the mid-19th century when oil was first discovered in North America in Oil Springs, Ontario, Canada, in 1858 and in the United States the following year with the Edmund Drake well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, we have to assume women were involved offshore, in some capacity, from the beginning.

American anthropologist Diane E. Austin, PhD, confirms this when she writes, “Long before the 1970s when oil and gas companies were forced by [US] federal civil rights laws and guidelines established by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to begin hiring women in offshore jobs, women were intimately involved with the industry” (2006, p. 173).

Despite that fact, not much was written about women working offshore in the US until the 1970s. Newspaper archives offer a fascinating glimpse into how the arrival (often referred to as the “invasion”) of women affected the previously all-male bastion of offshore oil and gas.

A brief article appeared in some US newspapers in September 1973, stating five women became the “first of their sex” to work offshore in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) when they were hired through a catering company to “take over cooking and cleaning jobs” on a drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana (no byline; 1973).4 The article specified the women would work a week on/week off rotation schedule. There was no mention of the women’s names nor were there any photos of the women to accompany the text – a strange phenomenon that still happens today.

A December 1975 New York Times’ article profiled four women working on a rig in the GoM, but focused mainly on 20-year old roustabout Cindy Myer, nicknamed “Ralph” by her male co-workers, since she “work[s] like a man.” Calling her “something of a pioneer,” the article says female roustabouts offshore are “rare and controversial. And most of the controversy about them is back on land” (Sterba, 1975).

As Dorothy Mitchell the night cook on the rig pointed out, the opposition didn’t always come from men, sometimes it was from their wives, as this March 7, 1977, letter in the iconic Dear Abby (“agony aunt”) American advice column illustrates on the following page.

In 1977, former pro golfer Kristin Lovelace made news when she became the first woman operator on an offshore platform off the coast of California for Chevron. Surprisingly, in this instance, instead of an article, most newspapers ran one or two captioned photos of Kristin, saying she “works a regular shift along with men,” (no byline, 1977), stating the obvious, but something that was an anomaly at the time.

Newspapers followed her career and two years later in June 1979, the Los Angeles Times included her in an article about Chevron’s platforms off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, just miles from where the first offshore rigs in the US were erected in the 1890s (Japenga, 1979). This time, although the writer mentions she was “the only woman on the West Coast employed as a platform operator,” the focus is more on Kristin’s technical and mechanical abilities than the fact that she is a woman and, in the photo caption, she is referred to as a “troubleshooting mechanical wizard.” However, platform operator Don Finch reveals that, “A lot of guys got real upset,” when Kristin first arrived offshore but says, except for a few diehards, they became convinced she was “obviously mechanically inclined” and capable of doing the same work they were.

It is common knowledge that in the early days (and the not-so-distant past) getting hired often was based on whom you knew. It may have helped that, according to the article, Kristin had been recruited by family friend, Chevron area supervisor Bill Ryherd, who at that point had been with the company nearly 30 years. Surely, some of his friends had sons he could have hired; apparently, he saw the potential in Kristin and was willing to go against convention.

“Women joining the ranks of offshore drilling” is the headline of an American newspaper article dated July 12, 1978, and sent over the wire by the Associated Press (AP) (no byline, 1978), which revealed, “A brief, unscientific survey of five platforms showed older men were concerned about the possibility of sexual encounters and the need to watch their language. Younger men spoke more about the competition.”

Robert Moore, Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, in 1984 reported for The Guardian newspaper in London on an EOC-funded5 study of recent female geology graduates seeking employment both onshore and off, and came to the blunt conclusion, “Exclusion from jobs by men is the problem” (1984).

Interestingly, things can work both ways and the workplace culture, whether offshore or on, is certainly influenced by the “top down” attitude. Even in the early days, occasionally there was a woman in charge. In an article from 1982, Sue Trolinger, then district manager of operations for Sun Exploration and Production’s northern district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose job entailed working offshore, is quoted as saying, “I don’t treat the men any differently on a rig than I do in the office” (Canetti, 1982).

Particularly in the early days, as Professor Moore’s study found, and even more recently, the lack of accommodations has long been used as a reason why there aren’t more women working offshore. Surely an industry capable of extracting hydrocarbons from beneath the ocean can figure out a way to accommodate all of the members of its workforce, regardless of sex. The writer of one article relayed a simple solution offered by a group of women working offshore in the GoM in 1978: “To the argument that a bed goes empty with a lone female on board, the ladies reply – put on another woman” (no byline, 1978).

Sometimes, it only takes a little ingenuity – and a sense of humor – to solve the problem. Norwegian Anne Grete Ellingsen, the first female offshore platform manager (OIM) in the North Sea, recalls complaining about the open shower stalls when she was offshore in the early ‘80s. On her next rota,6 as she walked toward the long row of showers, to her delight, she discovered one stall had been painted pink and covered with a pink shower curtain. “No man was going anywhere near that one!” she says, laughing at the memory. In fact, no man went anywhere near the shower area when she did. “I had it all to myself,” she recounts gleefully.

Ann Cairns, now president of international markets for MasterCard Worldwide, and the first female engineer certified to work offshore on UK rigs in the ‘80s (Groden, 2015), is not alone in recalling having to sit with her feet against a bathroom door to ensure privacy. “There were no women’s loos and no locks on the doors either” (no byline, 2013).

In a 2010 Fast Company article, chemical engineer Cynthia “C.J.” Warner, now president & CEO of Renewable Energy Group, Inc., gave a vivid description of what passed for privacy offshore in the ‘80s, given the lack of women’s accommodations, when she talked about being the only woman on a rig with 300 men and one bathroom – without a door. “You put the hard hat over your lap,” she says with a grin (Kamenetz, 2010).

Women in countries like the US, the UK, Norway, and Australia now have a 40-plus year history in the offshore industry but, for women in other countries, the opportunities are only beginning to be within reach.

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