Fostering Human Capital

Unquestionably, a gender gap still exists in the global downstream industry and the situation is even worse in the Middle East.

Women currently represent a fraction of the refining and petrochemicals industry’s workforce and are even scarcer in engineering, research and development, product and process development, and other technical fields that are considered as the lifeline of this business.

More importantly, progress varies significantly from country to country and tends to reflect how women are viewed in a region’s society.

A number of downstream companies have taken steps to recruit more women, and also to make the workplace more hospitable for female employees and to foster their professional development.

In the Middle East, women started making inroads in refining and petrochemicals as a result of the efforts taken by authorities to employ local youth, chiefly as a part of their nationalisation programmes. Some of them, who were among the first to join the industry, overcame hurdles to achieve great success in their respective fields and become role models for others to follow.

To celebrate the success of these hard working women, Refining and Petrochemicals Middle East organized a virtual roundtable discussion with leading downstream companies to discuss their experiences.

We have also decided to dedicate the April issue to such women as we sincerely believe gender diversity benefits companies in many ways including organisational performance, better creativity, and lower-risk decision-making.

Besides this, we have also listed and ranked our 2022 Top30 EPC contractors for the downstream industry in the current issue.