Women not afraid to get some dirt under their fingernails

ANDREA KLASSEN

Western Canadian Pipeline

When Tammy Meyer took her first drilling job in Medicine Hat in the mid-1990s, a woman in coveralls wasn't a particularly common sight. But that's never phased the 49 year-old Pennsylvania native, who today has mostly set aside her coveralls for business attire as president of Cancore Drilling.

A good thing, too. While women make up about 45 per cent of the workforce according to Statistics Canada, they account for only 23 per cent of those employed in Alberta’s mining and petroleum industries (about 33,400 people). Nationally, the number’s just under 60,000. In Saskatchewan, a 2007 survey by the Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada found only 11 per cent of employees were female.

The low participation rate isn’t a product of the recession - studies done in the 1990s and the beginning of the decade show almost the exact same rate of employment. In Great Britain, the UK Resource Centre offers similar statistics, with women accounting for about 21 per cent of those working in the oil and gas sector.

For industry women in Southern Alberta, these are numbers that could - and should - go up. But they say they aren’t sure what’s keeping women from venturing into one of the few industries that is still, as one worker puts it, “a man’s world.”

Cancore President Tammy Meyer had "no clue" about oil-field work when she moved to Medicine Hat from the USA in 1994. Until then, she'd spent most of her working life in the meat-packing sector, helping out with her family's slaughterhouse and grocery businesses.

Her first job in the industry, working for her husband Kevin's 3 Drilling Ltd., changed all that. Meyer spent the next five years out in the field, working as a roughneck in addition to doing company bookkeeping. Over the years, the couple grew the initially small company into an

Tammy Meyer - Cancore Drilling

10

WESTERN CANADIAN PIPELINE | MAY 2010

WESTERN CANADIAN PIPELINE | MAY 2010 11

eight-rig drilling operation and also started oil and gas company, Luxur Resources Inc.

3 Drilling sold out in 2004, and two years later Cancore Drilling was born. After sixteen years in the sector, Meyer says she couldn't stay away.

"When you bid a project, and you get a bunch of men together and everything runs smooth and you can finish a project with the least amount of time down, it's a good feeling after. It's a big relief. Yeah, it's a good feeling."

"It's in your blood, right?" she adds. "So you get right back into it."

Meyer can’t remember seeing any women in the area working in the industry when she started. But, she says, that never felt like a reason to stay out of the field.

"Because I wasn't from the area and didn't know much about it, I wasn't really intimidated by it," she explains. And these days, she can think of a number of female friends employed by oil and gas companies. “It’s more acceptable than when I started.”

If barriers do exist in the industry for women, Meyer doesn’t think they’re being set by those doing the hiring. Oil companies are mainly concerned with finding people who can help them get the best production out of their fields, she says. She doesn’t think a company would consider turning away a qualified applicant with the right attitude based on gender - and that in itself gives those women who do work in the oilfield an extra legitimacy.

"I think if a man sees a woman standing on lease or sitting at the boardroom table, " Meyer says, "he’s thinking that she wouldn’t be there unless she knew what she was doing."

Carrie Gregson is used to surprising people. With her unisex name and typically male job, the 29 year-old instrumentation tech has been referred to as “that fellow” in more than one corporate email.

Originally trained as an electrician, Gregson started doing instrumentation work during slow periods at her first job. She liked the work more, and today runs her own service truck, calibrating and maintaining gas compressors for Imperial Oil.

"It's been good for me,” she says. “I can't see myself doing anything else."

It’s also almost entirely a male pursuit. Gregson says she’s heard of a few other female techs working in the industry, but she’s never met one in the field or in training class.

“In the four years I went to school for instrumentation,

I never saw one girl go through the program,” she remembers. “When I did my electrical, there was at least two or three girls with me, and out in the field I've seen electricians who are women."

The reason, she thinks, is in the job description: "Instrumentation is a bit harder to break into. It's really long hours, it's not easy, it's dirty work - I'm covered in dirt and oil every day."

And though she can’t imagine doing anything else after 10 years in the field, she says the success and respect she has now took a long time to earn and in the early days being the only woman in a room full of men could be tough. Without support from her journeyman, who she remembers fondly, she isn’t sure she would have lasted in the industry.

Still, Gregson thinks there’s room for women in the industry, so long as they have a sense of humour and a willingness to earn the respect of their co-workers.

"You have to do what everybody else does. I mean, there's things I can't lift, or I need help lifting, but you just have to ask the questions and be right there," she says, adding she is seeing an increase in women working “behind the scenes” in the industry, as engineers and operators.

"There is a lot of room for women to be in there, right? You just have to have the-” she pauses, breaks into a grin and laughs. “The balls to do it."

"I don't understand it myself,” says Jody Wenaas with a small, puzzled frown. "I think there should be more women."

Wenaas, a 45 year-old office manager at Beacon Oilfield Services Ltd., practically grew up an oil woman. Her father is a consultant in the industry, and over the years she’s done everything from sandblasting and shop maintenance to field sales and book keeping. For the last 11 years she’s been one of the driving forces behind Beacon, a trucking and service company she runs with her husband.

Wenaas is quick to acknowledge the oilfield is still “a man’s world.” But to her that’s not a barrier - it’s a call to step up and prove just what women can do.

"We're a very equal opportunity employer,” she says of Beacon. “We have had several women work for us, ethnic groups, we've hired everybody. As long as you're capable of doing your job, we don't care. We just want you to do your job.

"I've pushed this with my husband. I've said, 'look at me.' Seriously, I can do what any other man can do. Sure, I'm not as strong. Men are stronger, we know that. But women aren't stupid. We can drive a truck, we can back a truck up, we can pile steel, we can do all

the same things. No, we are not as strong, but we are capable."

Like Meyer, Wenaas doesn’t think a qualified woman with the right attitude would have any problems finding work in the industry. But, she does think there’s something keeping the majority of women out of oil and gas.

“Maybe women don't want to get their hands dirty,” she suggests. “And oilfield, you're going to get your hands dirty. You just walk in through the shop and you're covered in grease."

After another moment of thought, she suggests another possibility.

"Maybe it's self confidence. See, me, I would go out and drive a bed truck. I don't know if (my bookkeeper) would. I think it's just individual - do you think you can do it?"

She points to women’s hockey, which only became an Olympic sport in 1998, as a possible parallel. When she played it was all recreational, with little room for aspiring athletes to move on. “These girls now have schools they can go to, scholarships. You can play for your country."

"Women can do anything,” she adds. “I mean, we can fold a mean t-shirt, but we can also do a lot of other things. Women are strong, they just have to believe in themselves."

There’s an excitement in Darcell Vickaryous’ voice when she talks about her future. The 20 year-old power engineering student at Medicine Hat College will spend the summer working for junior oil company Novus Energy Inc., and is hoping the experience could eventually translate into a full time job in the industry.

"It's just interesting,” she says. “There's more to do with the processes - more for me to do as a power engineer

(in oil and gas) than if I got into almost anything else."

Vickaryous is one of only two women in her class of 36, but says she’s heard from her instructors that the number of women in the college’s program is slowly creeping up, with a female student taking the course every year or so. Being one of the few women in her class isn’t a big deal, she says. She assumed from the start she was going to be one of the only ones.

"I think you're going to run into people that have a problem, but for the most part I've been lucky and haven't had to deal with much of that,” she says. “But that's anywhere you go, right? It's not because it's a bunch of guys, it's because it's people."

She says she chose power engineering because the hands on aspects - working with boilers, running turbines - appealed to her as much as the theory behind it. But, if a high school physics teacher with a son in power engineering hadn’t told her about it, she’s not sure she would have found the program on her own. If there’s a reason her class is mainly male, she thinks that might be it. It’s not easy to be interested in something you haven’t heard of, and women who wouldn’t think to look at the oil industry for employment may not be hearing about the roles that could appeal to them.

"I think if there was more information out there, and thrown towards everybody, you'd get a lot more people into the field," she says.

And while Vickaryous is ready to spend her working life in a man’s world, she wouldn’t mind running into a few women on her job sites - something that hasn’t happened to her yet.

"It would be exciting to get more women into the field, I think,” she adds. “Don't be afraid just because it's a guy's job. You can do it." Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19