Coleman told a World Petroleum Congress diversity panel in Istanbul that while his executives have gender-specific targets built into their performance contracts, he had stopped generating similar policies because the problem now lay in implementing them.

 

Coleman said 30% of Woodside's staff were women, which he called the "magic number" where "conversations started to change" internally and the company became a much more enjoyable place to work.

 

Yet he said there were still "in-built biases in the system" that CEOs like himself needed to challenge.

 

"I'll be honest: some of the most egregious acts that I've found within my company came out of my human resources group, which is 85% women. The least culturally diverse organisation in Woodside is my HR group," he said.

 

"There is not one African, Asian, Middle Eastern person in that group. You need to start going after that, because they're the front line in recruiting, so they're starting to recruit people who look like them.

 

"As the CEO you need to go all the way down to the recruitment of that university graduate who's making a choice and start feeding the pipeline through."

 

A new Boston Consulting Group study covering a quarter of the global oil and gas workforce launched at the congress showed that, at the entry level, young women who study engineering, math or geoscience don't necessarily feel compelled to work in the industry.

 

Report co-author Katharine Rick told the panel that the industry could do more to promote itself at that level to increase the pool of talent from which to choose, particularly by providing more role models.

 

"You would be surprised at the difference that makes for young women studying engineering to see somebody who has been successful in the industry. It's a huge motivating factor," she said.

 

About 56% of women in the survey felt they were overlooked for senior roles, which impacts their motivation to apply for them in the first place.

 

"One significant action we can take is to give the same opportunities in career development to women as we give to men, and not just assume that the woman would not want the job," Rick said.

 

Survey questions about ambition levels showed women do want those jobs, "and are probably even a bit more ambitious than men".

 

"They're also just as flexible as men in taking on assignments, but often don't get asked," Rick added.

 

"We also need to put more emphasis on measuring and ensuring we don't have a single woman in the department, because in almost every case this is doomed to fail.

 

"When you throw ‘one of a kind' in a big pool, that one of a kind has very little chance of succeeding because every small thing will be a huge failure."

 

 

Coleman said his own personal drive to increase diversity across the board at Woodside was because his four daughters - among five children - "deserve exactly the same opportunities that I've had … so each and every day I work towards that goal".

 

"Couldn't agree more and I've said that before as well," Baker Hughes' Texas-based Permian area engineering manager - completions and wellbore intervention Bryan Schilder

 said, commenting on Coleman's statements on his daughters on LinkedIn.

 

"I have 20 years until my daughter is in the workforce which means I have 20 years to help create the environment for a more balanced diverse and inclusive industry. 

 

"Should she choose oil and gas I want her to have the same opportunity to work hard and excel as I have. Diversity and inclusion breeds breakthrough thinking that yields results we cannot even fathom are possible."

 

Perth-based Squire Patton Boggs partner Clare Pope also chimed in that the underlying message of Coleman's comments needed to operate both within organisations and in relation to how they deal with their contractors and advisors.

 

"Is there a diverse team assisting them externally from their EPC contractors? Accountants? Lawyers? Joint venture partner representatives? Diversity shouldn't just be looked for within and organisation, it should also be sought in relation to those that you are doing business with," she said.

 

 

Coleman revealed a sad day at Woodside six years ago when it was discovered 16% of its graduate recruitment intake were women, which he was told merely reflected the number of girls in science, technology, engineering and math courses.

 

Coleman said he threw those stats out as "unacceptable" and the next year Woodside's female intake was up at 50%, and has stayed there for the past five years.

 

Yet the diversity challenge doesn't end there, he said.

 

"I said ‘show me the names of the graduates', and the issue I saw is they were all white Anglo-Saxon, which was reflective of the university base they came from; but it doesn't reflect the broader community," he said.

 

"Early on we set some broad objectives but I challenged the organisation ‘don't make me set a target', because you get the excuse that setting targets means you get token outcomes and the quality of people being promoted isn't good enough. 

 

"That's simply not true. They are good enough, but you need to keep replenishing the pool, because when you start this kind of program you deplete it very quickly."

 

Engineers India executive director - technical Vartika Shukla told the panel that 12% of her group's workforce out of 3200 employees were women, while her country's public sector in averaged about 6%.

 

Pedro Miras Salamanca, chairman of Spanish stockholding entity Cores which maintains the country's strategic oil reserves and natural gas stocks, also told the panel that flexibility was the key.

 

"You have to give [women] flexibility to do their work in the way that they need, which is these days easier due to technology improvements enabling people to work from home," he said.