Nigeria's growing number of female oil bosses
September 11, 2014
By Orin Gordon*
[caption id="attachment_11955" align="alignleft" width="300"] Catherine Uju Ifejika is one of Africa’s few female oil industry bosses[/caption]
The oil and gas industry is still overwhelmingly male, with surveys showing that the executive boardrooms of petroleum companies are mostly a boys’ club.
In Nigeria, a number of well-financed businesswomen are aiming to change the picture there. The Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke is a powerful figurehead for them. “The fact that two of the biggest cabinet positions in Nigeria, petroleum and finance, are held by women, show how far we have come,” she told a recent meeting in Vienna, referring to the other prominent female member of the cabinet – Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. “We are there not because we are women. We are there because of our competence as managers.” Yet as surveys make clear, women managers are still in the minority in the world’s oil and gas companies. Laura Manson-Smith, a consulting partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says the representation picture is dismal. “I was surprised at how low the percentage of female directors was [in oil and gas firms around the globe] – 11%, most of them are in non-executive positions, 1% of executive board seats are held by women.” Offshore drilling Nigeria, the world’s 14th-largest oil producing country with 2.4 million barrels a day, has taken steps to open up its oil industry to locals, a policy known as “indigenisation.” Now a handful of female entrepreneurs are hoping to build on that, by increasing women’s stake in the industry.“When we were growing up we only had Margaret Thatcher,” says Amy Jadesimi, the managing director of Ladol, a petroleum services company based in Lagos.
[caption id="attachment_11956" align="alignright" width="300"]
Winihin Ayuli-Jemide, a Lagos-based entrepreneur and former lawyer, is a leading advocate of research on women in business and government.
She argues that one of the reasons South Africa was the dominant economy in Africa for so long is that South African women have been deeply involved in businesses of all sizes. “They dominate the low capital businesses, the ‘informal sector’ such as manufacturing knitwear, tie and dye and homemade food for sale in municipal markets.” “At the level of small to medium enterprises, they’re well ingrained and established.” [caption id="attachment_11957" align="alignleft" width="300"]

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