Oil & Gas Middle East is excited to present its first list of the women making waves in the upstream industry. According to the World Petroleum Council, only 20% of the world’s oil and gas workforce is female. While we are seeing stronger commitments towards diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry, there is still a long way to go.
We are recognising the achievements of some of the many outstanding women in the upstream sector who continue to push the industry forward—clear examples of what happens when people with different backgrounds and viewpoints are included in important conversations and in the decision-making process.
Tayba Al Hashemi
CEO, Al Yasat Petroleum, ADNOC Group
Tayba Al Hashemi started her career in ADNOC in 2002 as a Reservoir Engineer and progressed steadily through the ranks, becoming the CEO of Al Yasat Petroleum in 2018. She has been involved in many significant ADNOC initiatives: redefining the exploration strategy, unlocking undeveloped reservoirs, developing new gas fields, representing ADNOC and women nationally and internationally, and helping develop young talent in the nation.
Her current focus is on leading the ADNOC Operating Company, Al Yasat Petroleum. Her team is shaping Al Yasat into a new style of modern oil company within ADNOC, responsible for developing some of Abu Dhabi’s next wave of marginal and unconventional fields – a role that will have increasing significance in Abu Dhabi’s oil industry and make a major contribution to ADNOC’s production growth strategy.
This is being achieved by employing a lean operating model, partnering with leading service companies, embedding technology and using data, and investing in people to build specialized skills at the leading edge of oil and gas.
“It was a clear and focused path for me and although I was conscious of there being a lack of females in the industry at that time, I was confident that with the UAE leadership being as encouraging and supportive of women as it was, and has continued to be, that this would be possible for me to achieve my goals,” she says.
Patty Eid
Global Head of Petrofac Training Services
Prior to joining Petrofac Training Services, Patty started as a young legal advisor, then moved to Abu Dhabi as Head of Legal Services and Company Secretary, before returning to Sharjah as a Commercial Director. In her current role, she leads the Petrofac Training Services (PTS) which is a smaller part of the business, but has a disproportionate impact. PTS has been getting people home safely for more than 40 years. It is also a core capability of the Petrofac Group. It offers a broad portfolio of industry-accredited oil, gas and renewable energy training, and our facilities include Europe’s largest fire training ground, the UK’s first ever Emergency Response Service Centre, and a range of state-of-the-art technical training centres.
“The woman and leader I am today, I owe to the experiences of my early life. My family had to flee from Lebanon to Canada when I was 9 years old due to the civil war. The hardships that came with that influenced my perspective to life in general as well as my approach to work and success,” she says.
“When I joined Petrofac, more than a decade ago, I was young and hungry and determined to prove myself. I was given the opportunity to excel and in my early years, I spent time understanding the inner-workings of the Petrofac group.”
Latifa Al Said
Development Programs HR Director, Baker Hughes
Born in Muscat, Oman, Latifa has more than 13 years of experience in Human Resources the oil & gas industry. She started her career in Oman with Schlumberger in 2006 and held various HR positions in Oman, UAE, Syria, Kuwait and the United Kingdom.
She joined Baker Hughes in 2018 as the Oilfield Equipment Regional HR Leader based in Dubai where she worked on driving organizational change. She is currently the Development Programs HR director for Baker Hughes, where she works on designing and structuring the talent development programmes (ASPIRE, CULTIVATE, and IMPACT) for the company in contemporary ways.
The two toughest challenges in her career were: Her assignment in Syria, which coincided with the pollical unrest in 2012 where her role focused on keeping employees safe and managing the evacuation of expats in country.
The second challenge was during 2020; as the nature of programs at Baker Hughes is rotational, we to ensure the safety of employees during the pandemic as well as maintaining their wellbeing and moral.
Looking towards 2021, Latifa continues to execute in the new norm, taking the company forward and developing future industry leaders through the Baker Hughes development programs.
Shireen Shaikh
General Manager Sales, Industrial Power Solutions, Middle East, North Africa, Turkey & India, Baker Hughes
Shireen started her career as a software engineer at Mindscape Mashreq Bank, then stepped out to pursue her masters in IT and was then hired into an IT Leadership Program at General Electric (GE), after which she joined the Corporate Audit Staff leadership program, eventually making her way to GE Oil & Gas in the fulfilment analytics practice. She then took another challenge, as the Sales Operations & Growth Leader for the MENATI region which set the foundation for her current role of establishing the Industrial Power Solutions business for this region, where she leads the team to shape the Company’s go to market strategy and drive the commercial intensity to penetrate new sectors. Her current role is aligned to one of Baker’s Hughes’ key strategic pillars for growth, and therefore her goal for 2021 is to create brand awareness by building strategic customer connections and being a flag bearer for driving the energy transition journey and enabling a path to net-zero for the energy and industry. Looking back, Shireen considers her career path unusual but extremely rewarding. She takes a lot of pride in knowing that through her work in the energy and industrial she has coached many individuals, touched the lives of people in communities where the Company operates, helped her explore uncharted spaces and taught her to deal with ambiguity.
Esra Al Hosani
Technology specialist, ADNOC Offshore
Esra Al Hosani is making strides with her research into the circular economy. In her thesis for the University of Cambridge, she considered how oil producers could tackle waste to boost sustainability, using the circular economy to maximise resources. In her study, she contemplates a way to use waste gas and water regularly produced during oil production, using ADNOC Offshore as her case study. In considering a new cycle for oil and gas byproducts, her research is setting the bar for national oil companies to consider innovative methods of reducing waste and working in collaboration with other companies, organisations, and countries.
“So far the concept of the circular economy is mostly theoretical,” Al Hosani says. “There is not much practical research, so I decided to try a practical, real-life scenario in the oil and gas industry to study the typical value chain of the oil barrel and see if we can maximize the value of oil.”
Abeer Aljabr & Jazyah Al-Dossary
Saudi Aramco
Abeer AlJabr and Jazyah Aldossary, two Saudi Aramco engineers, became the kingdom’s first female firefighters in 2018, challenging the status quo. Aljabr is an industrial engineering and engineering management graduate from the Univeristy of Sharjah, UAE, and Aldossary is a chemical engineering graduate from the University of Missouri in the US.
“I’m proud to become a firefighter and be part of an organisation that gives equal opportunities,” Aljabr says. “I’m especially proud to be part of a department that believed in us and supported us as we went through the training.”
Razan AlLawati
Graduate Engineer, Petrofac
Being an engineer and being able to construct complex structures fascinated Razan from a tender age. After completing her schooling, she left Oman and moved to the UK to acquire a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Cardiff.
She joined Petrofac in 2019 through the company’s Graduate Programme, which aims to mentor and develop young talent by giving them opportunities to work in a variety of roles. As a young engineer with Petrofac, Razan has had the opportunity to quickly accelerate her career, gaining experience on construction sites, working in various engineering disciplines, learning how to apply new technologies and taking on key responsibilities with one of the company’s major projects with PDO.
“I am proud to be a young female engineer, and my goal is to continue to move forward in my career and inspire others to join this field as there are broad opportunities to excel,” she says.
