Commodity Insights LIVE’s Post

Transcript

Hi, I'm Laganga, Head of News for Asia based in Singapore. I'm talking today to Mike who attended a very interesting event last evening in London. Mike, could you tell us a little bit about the event that you attended and what was it about? Sure, have some. It was a really, really interesting event and I'm, I'm really happy to be able to share, share it with you. So I was asked literally just over a month ago, probably probably the scariest talk in a way that I've given this year. Would I go and present to the SP's Women in energy conference in London? It's the first time they've held it since before COVID and the theme was the energy transition, artificial intelligence and women's. There is in general, so that that was the focus of it. And I was asked to talk a little bit about my career and women I'd interacted with and also about the energy transition as a keynote speaker. So what, what exactly did you capture in your keynote? Would you mind sharing some? No, of course. It, it was very interesting. I, as I say, I, I actually sweated over this one. OK, quite often when people ask me to do a talk, I'll pull a, a bit of that theme and a bit of that theme and a bit of another theme, spin them together and you've got your talk. I knew I was presenting to, to, to a roomful of women who did not want, they didn't want platitudes. They didn't want standard. Standard input from a, from a keynote speaker. So what I actually did was draw sort of theme between the energy transition and the diversity transition and see how those two were going and where we were headed. And I also used anecdotally stories from from across my 30 years in, in, in the upstream industry with various females I've worked with either in a leadership or a peer capacity or reporting to me. Excellent. You know, this is actually so timely, Michael and. So we in Asia, we're pulling together a report on women in energy in Asia. We're planning to launch it at APEC. And one of the things that we have tried to dig and ask is as we are transitioning in this whole world of energy transition, does diversity make a difference? Because we do need people to to be thinking out-of-the-box. We need different voices, different views. So is that something that you discussed? Does diversity make a difference? When it comes to tackling issues like climate change and and sort of transitioning from the old to new ways of thinking and doing things. Absolutely. That was key. So I was sandwiched between the two. Two excellent female speakers are a senior vice president of of Wells at BP and Davis, and then Amy Challen, who's Shelley's global head of artificial intelligence. But between the three of us, we did dig into the the need for diverse teams. The the energy transition is massive. It's significant. It requires not just not just input from from diverse teams, but it a range of solutions. From governments, through companies and into communities. So we didn't just talk about top down different skills. We talked about the effect of the energy transition in that it has the potential as we start to address energy poverty to, to liberate women from lives that they lead today. And, and, and so we may see even more women and diverse thinking coming into the jobs market over the next couple of decades and the networking that's going to be required. Between governments and companies to collaborate on the way forward, we missions reduction, implementation of new energies. Absolutely, diversity is going to be so crucial to this because there is no there's no single way forward And and when you've got multiple pathways, you need multiple perspectives. Excellent. What were some of your key takeaways from the event by Top three key takeaways? I think. It's a shame, it was rather unsurprising. The that there's still a long way to go with diversity. The upstream industry had started to progress, but has slipped back a little. And even in even in renewable energy more widely across the energy space, it looks healthier for women in terms of a third third of the workforce is now female. But when you look at the women who are in technical leadership roles, that actually shrinks back to about 20%. So we've still got a ways to to go with with with diversity we explored. The concept of achieving diversity through quotas and very interesting, there was widespread feeling amongst women that quotas were an instrument that actually could have a negative impact rather than a positive impact. So there was a preference not to not to have quotas when we got into talking about women and technology. Now there's much more equality in technology itself as an industry are much higher percentage of of women in leadership positions and and more generally in the workforce. Um, and what we didn't get time to do, which I'd have loved to do, was to explore whether women are more more prone or, or happy to use article as ficial intelligence. I'm stumbling over the word there. That there was a feeling, there's still a feeling across the spectrum of uncertainty around the role of AI. Is it going to really take off? Is it going to displace jobs? And so again, we explored with Amy's help how it's actually a positive force and how the human in the loop is still going to be essential, finishing up with the role of of women as as part of that human in the loop component. Yeah, yeah. No, Excellent. I think all of these are so relevant. Right, especially, I mean, if it helps us do our jobs faster, it's better for women who are often multitasking and trying to balance the home and kids. And I mean, you know, all of that, right? So excellent. And how, how does S&P Global, like, what was your feel? How does, how do we as a, as an organization, as SMP Global compare with other organizations in, in this specific area? I think we do a stellar job. I really do, Um. I was very pleased to actually outline briefly when we got into a couple of specific points, happy to outline what the company does in terms of female specific benefits and and things like that. The flexibility of our parental leave, the way that we do welcome people back into work after the way that we stay in touch with them while they're on parental leave. And not just women but but obviously men too, but S&P Global. Appears to be something of a leader and I got that through the follow up. I had an amazing amount of follow up in the coffee breaks and at lunchtime. I literally for the first time ever had a queue of people wanting to speak to me, a proper queue. And I got the impression that that we are, we're something of a leader because people wanted to explore how we operate as a business and and how we make these things work. Excellent, excellent. Lovely chatting with you, Mike. Thank you so much for listening. Have a good day.