Women in Process Plants - Girls can do it!

It is unbelievable that majority of our businesses and various commercial organisations have vastly employed men. Whereas almost all educational institutions today have nearly equal participation of both genders among students as well as teachers, but the working population is still infested with men. What happened to all the women who graduate from colleges? Of course there are several focussed efforts - particularly from NGOs - where women are being given first option of rejecting the offer. It is clear that the women folk in our societies are becoming more exposed to challenges of daily routines and tough tasks, but still we have a long way to go. One may argue that the situation in western world has vastly improved - it is said the overall average of women among working population being about 30%; but it could be worse. This can get substantiated, if you look at who is occupying the leadership roles in any organisation which is easily visible.

In India, there are several domains in which women have taken enormous lead; credit to them on this account. Such domains, besides educational institutes, are banks, call centres, journalism, design, entertainment, almost all customer facing roles in IT & telecom industry, tourism & hospitality, restaurants and food stores, and few more. From ancient days, women in rural India have taken equal participative roles in agriculture; and in modern times as unskilled labour in urban areas' construction jobs. The overall gender ratio in India among working population is stated to be about 30% -- not very much different from numbers of West.

Among professional roles, women are leaps & bounds ahead in the medical & research fields. But in Engineering & Technology, although a huge proportion of women are qualifying in recent times, their participation in the industry (except IT) still very small. I believe that the strength of women in these fields is about 20% or less. Women can do surely well in manufacturing & processing industry. They are well suited to excel in management, planning, data analysis & troubleshooting, etc.

A manufacturing factory or a process unit does not only have Operation, Maintenance, Safety, Engineering & design and such functions. But there are other functions too which are essential in any factory or process unit. For instance, take the human resource management & industrial relations function, where a touch of empathy, compassion and brotherhood / sisterhood approach could be of great help and who is better to do this than qualified women?. They can do a better job with office & factory administration - if you look at the way they have managed the homes till recent times single handedly. I am sure the overall performance especially, Safety, Operating Discipline, Industrial Relations, Community Communication and support etc. will be highly improved if we have women in large proportion in various support roles.

Imagine a process unit operator or even a senior engineer / manager from the plant side walking into the HR office to discuss about a chronic problem about daily commute / transport, or about the service quality of snacks & teak during night shifts - which are typical problems that arise. The way the problem will be put forth, discussed and a suitable action that will be worked out, will be much different if we have women as the HR officer instead of a male.

In the refinery where I had worked once, the head of the site once co-opted the women family members of the employees just to emphasis the importance of conducting daily activities safely. When the women folks of the employees themselves were advising the employees in their work locations, there was a massive impact on operating behaviours of the employees & other workers.

Who knows, how much valuable the womenfolk could be of, if they get the required responsibilities & authority in functions such as purchases & contracts commercial deal making, finance & accounting, compliance management, documentation & data centre management, training centre, etc. etc. There are ample no. of qualified womenfolk out there today as compared to a decade ago. As mentioned earlier, no. of women in engineering colleges, management institutes, etc. being high, sourcing them will not be a big deal.

Besides the above areas, there is an array of technical functions viz. Operation & Maintenance, Engineering, Design, Technical Services & HSE management; surely we can find tremendous opportunities for women to play bigger roles. I have known some strong women chemical engineers, who were just out of the college, who wanted to work in the factory floor - night shifts included; and this was in 2004 when I was running the crude distiller in the refinery. Today the situation must be much more challenging.

In various group activities, whether they are just review meetings, team work for problem solving such as Design reviews, Vendor evaluation, audits & assessments, making a change proposal, interviews & selection of new employees, etc, I have seen wherever women folks were involved, they were always very clear with their perspective of the matter at hand, and they could communicate better. Their inputs were always original and authentic; they always were positive in putting across their ideas with due respect to that of others' or opposing views.

These days, there are lot of discussion that jobs are disappearing in the advent of AI. I would actually prefer if the people loose their jobs to women instead of AI - if at all. I am not sure if AI would to better than a men whereas I am sure, that woman would do the jobs better than men in the industry.