Wise Professional Network 2020 Launch Event

Wise Professional Network (WPN) held their first event of 2020 at The Globe bar on Thursday 13th February to an audience of over 60 people. The 2020 launch event, sponsored by Baker Hughes Company, was held to share an update of what Wise has been up to and what’s in store for 2020.

Following an acknowledgment to country, Nicola Morrison, Vice chair and Senior EPC Tender Manager for Baker Hughes kicked off the event. Baker Hughes acknowledge there is work to do in regards to workplace equality and have many focus groups working to allow their employees come to work as their true selves.
 
Gail Milne, WPN Chair shared the WPN Vision which is to achieve gender equity through growing the profile of women in STEM roles through the promotion of strategies and initiatives to Attract, Retain, Develop, and Promote women within the subsea and other ocean-based industries.

Gail went on to say ‘Gender inequity not only limits the available talent pool, it’s also bad for business. Currently there are still only around 17% of women students enrolling in Engineering for instance and we need to help increase this number and of course we then want to support them to come and work in our industry.

Another interesting fact from the latest WGEA findings is that although there has been an increase in companies with flexible work policies only around 2% of men are taking flexible work options.

We need to help our industry companies take action to support the development of gender inclusive businesses. We want to make flexible working normal for everyone, help increase the pool of women into leadership positions by sponsoring and mentoring them and create flexible pathways to leadership positions. And support the younger generation of girls and women to not have to face the issues that women have taditionally faced in this industry. This is the only way the gender pay gap will reduce.
 
2019/2020 Update
The ‘Get Wiser’ series of lunch and learns, last year reached over 300 people with around a 70/30 women/men split. The 2020 program has been put together covering a variety of topics of both technical and personal development.
 
Mentoring – WPN are once again involved with the joint industry mentoring program and actively supporting more women to take up mentor and mentee roles.

The Future Engineers Program increased to 50 girls in 2019 and 32 schools with over 400 volunteer hours. The feedback for this program has been amazing and it will be running again in 2020. We are always looking or sponsors and volunteers for this program. In addition, WPN are also supporting the PC Next Generation program with our committee members signing up to be panel mentors.
 
We believe in collaboration with other groups working towards gender equity goals – lots of small groups working together can make big things happen!

Gail then handed over to Vandana Crispin, Project Manager of the GI WOW (Gender Inclusive Ways of Working) project and Project Manager at Oceaneering to explain more about the project. The mission statement of the GI-WOW team is to be an inclusive and sustainable team that delivers
unique gender-inclusive recommendations, tailored for the subsea and ocean-based sectors, that will enable these industries to level the playing field working towards gender equity. Vandana went onto explain that one in four female engineers leave the field after age 30, compared to only one in 10 male engineers, according to the Society of Women Engineers. Almost half leave due to non inclusive organisational climate, characterised by supervisors or co-workers unconscious and conscious bias, as a primary reason. This leads to a systemic issue of lack of advancement opportunities or wage gap for same roles. Women have also unfortunately experienced negative feedback for assuming caring or parental responsibilities along with work and often have found lack of flexible work options or lack of inclusiveness in our offshore and remote worksites. The GI WOW project is not here to fix the women, it is to change the way that organisations work and ensure that they adapt to have a more inclusive and diverse workforce.

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This launch night was a huge success and we would like to thank everyone who came and networked and made new contacts. We look forward to seeing you at the next event!
 
Wise Professional Network is not just for women and we encourage anyone interested in supporting our Vision and projects to contact us on email: wise@subseaenergy.org.au