Anna Collyer, AEMC Chair
Women in Renewables Summit, Sydney
Thank you for your welcome and for the pleasure of being able to address such a tremendous group today.
I pay my respects to the Elders of the Gadigal people, on whose land we meet. In today’s context of diversity, inclusion and gender, I particularly acknowledge First Nations women everywhere, and the role they have played in the custodianship of the earth and waters we rely upon for energy today.
As Minister Bowen put it earlier this year, the transition will have failed if First Nations people are not engaged at its centre.
As the program says, I’ve got the great pleasure of kicking off this conference by speaking about some challenges for women, and for diversity in general, as well as our related opportunities for shifting the status quo in the energy sector.
And I would like to be clear at the outset that when I speak about the challenges for women, I am very mindful that similar challenges exist for many other under-represented groups in our sector.
I’m also mindful that while I have my own take on those challenges, some of what I present today will inevitably be familiar to many of you.
There are times when we all channel America Ferrera’s frustrated character from the Barbie Movie when she describes the impossibility of being a woman. And yes, I know the Barbie Movie is ageing a bit in pop culture terms, but I am the proud owner of a full set of Eco-Barbies and I absolutely loved that film. So, please bear with me because it won’t be the last time I mention it!
The scene I am thinking of goes something like this:
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.
It's too hard!
It's too contradictory … and nobody gives you a medal, or says thank you!
And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong …but also everything is your fault.
Some critics took issue with that monologue as an oversimplification, but in one interview I read, Ferrera countered:
We can know things and still need to hear them out loud.
And as the monologue goes on to say, if even a plastic doll finds it overwhelming, what hope have the rest of us got?
So – while we probably all feel the challenges I’m going to describe are pretty familiar, I do feel it’s worth saying them out loud. Importantly, though, apart from the challenges I also want to be sure we discuss opportunities, and hope.
I want to share what I believe is the very real likelihood of change for the better in our workforce. There is a ‘secret sauce’ behind my belief, and it’s hidden in the title of this conference, but I will come back to that shortly.
Firstly, another favourite quote of mine, from one of the leaders of the international gender equality movement for energy, Canadian Isabelle Hudon.
Isabelle makes the case for ensuring a diverse workforce in energy by pointing out the enormity of the task ahead of us to reach net zero by 2050.
‘We must harness all possible talent,’ Isabelle says, ‘to discover the breakthrough solutions that will transform energy and the world.’
There is no value, in other words, in leaving half of the world’s great ideas on the sidelines just because the people having them aren’t traditionally found in energy sector jobs.
I believe we can be more diverse. I believe we can be more inclusive. And I believe our workplaces can be safer and more supportive regardless of gender
But, most of all, I believe we can achieve these outcomes by meeting our global goal of Equal by ’30, which aims for 50% representation of women in our energy workforce by 2030.
Now, obviously we aren’t going to magic up hundreds of thousands of female electricians and engineers in just five years. While STEM careers are a critical area of focus in improving gender equality in the energy sector, we won’t get to 50% by focusing just on STEM.
We will also need many more people who have what I call ‘power skills’, if you’ll pardon the pun.
These are skills like collaboration, creativity, problem-solving, innovation and inclusiveness.
They are indeed powerful skills for any industry, and they appear very often among women working in helpful fields like:
- lawyers to help design and implement regulatory change
- economists to help understand and prepare the new market
- communication experts to help us bring communities along the energy transition journey
- and sales and marketing professionals capable of packaging new electricity products in offers that make it easy for customers to participate in the market in ways that benefit them and the power system overall.
So. Where do we stand in 2024?
Women are underrepresented across the board in energy, from technical roles to executive positions. By best estimates from WGEA and other sources, women make up less than 25% of the workforce in the energy sector.
While we currently lack some of the detailed data we’d like, I could still confidently sketch a pretty shallow bell curve showing women across all possible energy roles.
In my imaginary chart, you’d have a reasonable bump if you placed regulatory and not-for-profit jobs in the middle but a nearly flat line at either end if you put trades on one side and CEOs on the other.
On the other hand, if we change the chart’s axis to only look at women in renewable energy organisations, the numbers are more encouraging – around 40% in total and a more visible appearance in leadership roles.
And this, as I see it, is the secret sauce – because the renewable energy component of the overall energy sector is growing and must grow even further and faster.
While we’re all used to hearing AEMO’s integrated system plan numbers, an essential plan to move us forward, for some purposes I prefer to look at the bigger picture. Net Zero Australia’s modelling says renewables must grow 40 times beyond the NEM’s current capacity for clean fuel production.
That growth will contribute significantly to our skilled workforce expansion from about 100,000 today to between 700,000-800,000 people by 2060.
And the wonderful thing is that – for a whole range of reasons that may have very little to do with sunshine, water or wind – many renewable energy enterprises are already within cooee of 50% representation of women in their workplaces.
Just one of those reasons could be because research shows us diverse and inclusive teams are significantly better at innovation. And innovation is the lifeblood of a successful, emerging industry like renewable energy.
Renewable businesses may have once been the ‘hippy fringe’ – as I’ve heard it said with various degrees of affection – but they are absolutely mainstream now, and on their way to being the dominant power source around Australia and the world.
That means, increasingly, regardless of gender, the ‘suits in the room’ for energy sector decision-making are more likely to come from a culture that accepts diversity and inclusion. And that aspect of renewable energy offers us the chance to change everything.
By the very nature of this conference, many of you come from organisations that have implemented a thing or two that really works to build gender balance and—I hope—a broader focus on other forms of diversity.
You are also likely to be values-driven, seeking to create a better world via the energy transition and perhaps feeling additional stress because of that challenge.
And all of you will be here to find more and better ways to support women and other under-represented people seeking to play their part in the energy transition.
At the end of my talk today, I am going to assign each of you a task based on that.
But first, let’s do the job of diagnosing our key challenges: I picture them as three big buckets of barriers to more diverse representation across the sector.
These buckets hold:
- problems relating to physical and psychological safety
- issues relating to unconscious bias and interpretations of merit
- and systemic barriers connected to child-bearing, parenting and other forms of caring.
The first of these barriers is the existence of physical and psychological safety for all women in the workplace. I’ve been fortunate to have not experienced open discrimination or worse behaviour in my career. Unfortunately, I am sure the same can’t be said for everyone in this room. Overcoming this is absolutely fundamental.
Until we can openly identify and resolve safety and welfare issues, no amount of leadership and empowerment in other areas will attract and retain women in our sector in great numbers, especially out in the field.
The release of new Respect@Work requirements will hopefully help ensure this baseline exists in all workplaces. I am sure other expert speakers here today will focus on this and related safety discussions.
One thing I would like to share from my perspective is an opportunity that we have found to improve psychological safety at the AEMC.
We are very fortunate. We have maintained gender equality across all seniority levels for some years, and we would like to think that physical and psychological safety is our minimum standard for all employees. But - is it? We didn’t want to make that assumption. We also didn’t want to equate gender equality with diversity and inclusion: it helps, but it’s not the whole picture.
In recent staff surveys, we detected some concerns — particularly from younger staff members — about their confidence in expressing ideas that might not fit what senior staff were discussing, and about the consequence of being ‘wrong’.
Now – we all like to think we are open to new ideas, but we probably also like to think that our experience has taught us what will work.
As we explored these concerns, we realised it’s all too easy to unintentionally or subconsciously send dismissive messages in our choice of words, the way we sit in a meeting, or the way we react to an unexpected outcome.
And when we do send those messages, we can make someone feel less safe to speak up.
We are a small organisation with a huge workload of rule changes crucial to enable the market for the transition, and we simply can’t afford to miss any good ideas – especially if they are a bit left field.
While we have a strong record of listening to our stakeholders and changing direction when they convince us of a better way – we really want to ensure our staff understand this attitude applies to them too.
All of this has led us to an extensive training program for our directors and managers to help ensure their team members all feel psychologically safe to share their ideas and to make and learn from mistakes.
So now to my second bucket of barriers – the challenging issues around unconscious bias and merit, which tend to show up in places like recruitment, pay, and promotion. I do have some experience here!
When I started as a lawyer in the early 1990s, the firm I joined had two female partners out of around 50, or 4%. That was notable because to have any women as partners then was considered a big deal.
By the time I was appointed a partner in 2001, we were up to 17% female, and when I retired from the partnership in 2020, we had reached our then-target of 35%.
The firm recently announced it has reached the agreed goal of 40-40-20: a minimum of 40% each male and female partners, with flexibility for the remaining 20%.
There were many, many actions contributed to this, but a large part of it was breaking down what merit really looked like, and addressing the tendency to perceive a good hire as ‘someone who looks like me’.
So where are the opportunities for the energy sector here? For a start – let’s accept that targets work. That’s probably music to your ears!
As a sector, we are already particularly focused on targets. There’s a quite elegant analogy—in my view—between our net zero emissions target for 2050 and the Equal by 30 target for gender equality 2030.
Setting a target, especially a tough one, forces us to step back and examine the barriers to achieving that target, and what we need to do differently to overcome those barriers.
Targets force us to question our assumptions, undertake research, make bold choices, and move ever forward, being accountable for our goals.
Those diversity goals might look different right now in a transmission company, say, than in a hydrogen start-up or a community battery manufacturer. Your targets might be different if you start from a 90/10 gender split versus a 60/40 split or if you have gender equality overall but poor representation in leadership.
However, the principle remains the same no matter your starting point. The opportunity to set an ambitious target and openly discuss ways to reach it is a very practical way to challenge the status quo and make a change.
As I mentioned, the AEMC is sitting happily on a 50/50 gender representation at all levels of seniority, but again we don’t want to rest upon those laurels.
We maintain vigilance with regular check-ins on things we know help us keep to that level, like pay parity and career progression.
Pay parity is a good example, because it’s such a straightforward thing to do. Annually, our HR people basically run a spreadsheet that looks at pay across roles and genders. For a powerful tool, it is, I’m told, a very simple exercise.
It gives us data we can examine and compare, holding ourselves accountable from year to year.
Finally, to my third bucket of barriers, which I think of as the structural issues that arise from the fact that women bear children and, more broadly, remain the dominant carers in our society. This one is very close to home for me.
My husband James has been the primary caregiver for our children and our family since I went back to work when our eldest was 6 months old, close to 20 years ago now.
This arrangement has given me enormous freedom in pursuing my career but has been both a joy and a challenge for James as he stepped outside what was considered normal for men as fathers.
The ability for families to have real choices about who does what is another critical step for enabling women to pursue careers.
So, one of the simplest of opportunities here is to level the playing field for new parents so that it becomes equally possible for women to return to work after having children.
As a society, we’re slowly recognising how important it is for women that we normalise the opportunity for men to be primary or equal-time caregivers.
WGEA’s latest paid parental leave figures emphasise how unequal this can be. Just under two-thirds (63%) of employers fund paid parental leave, and only a third of them offer it universally to men and women. Even when PPL is available, men account for a small – albeit growing – proportion of people taking it: 14% at the most recent count.
If your organisation is not one of the two-thirds offering universal PPL, or if the proportion of male staff taking it up is very small, that’s an opportunity to challenge the status quo, and see real change for your employees’ families.
At the AEMC, we offer 12 weeks paid parental leave to all primary carers regardless of gender and we pay superannuation throughout both paid and unpaid parental leave.
And, while this is more of a quirk than a trend, last I checked, we actually had more men on PPL than women.
Conclusion – call to action
In conclusion – you may have picked up that I am a glass-half-full person. I do believe we will reach these targets, both for net zero and for women.
But like everyone, I have days… and then I have days.
If I return to my favourite Barbie movie moment, the moment just before that America Ferrara monologue speaks to us all, too.
In that scene, Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie is face-down on the floor having, as Weird Barbie describes it, an existential crisis.
She doesn’t feel pretty, she doesn’t feel smart, she can’t do brain surgery, she’s never flown a plane, and no one on the Supreme Court is her.
She sobs: I’m not good at anything.
And who hasn’t had a day like that? We all feel like that sometimes.
This is where the speech I quoted from earlier begins, with the line:
It is literally impossible to be a woman.
And with that, the very fictional but relatable character played by America Ferrara lifts Barbie up and gets her to keep going, because this work is just too important to stop.
So this is my challenge to you all:
Keep going.
It’s too important to stop.
The inclusion of women and other under-represented people throughout the energy sector is essential for us to get where we are going.
We need every available talent and every kind of perspective, applied to the fundamental transformation of the energy sector if we’re to reach net zero by 2050.
We all need to diagnose our organisations’ barriers to equity and diversity.
We need to learn from others how we can do things differently to overcome those barriers, and then we need to put real resources behind the solutions.
Before you leave this conference, the task I have for you is to do two things.
First, think of something good that is happening in your organisation to support diversity and inclusion.
I know you can find something you’re proud of, even if it’s quite simple, like some of the examples I’ve given you from the AEMC.
In other words, what is your secret sauce that is making a difference, be it small or large?
Maybe it’s an attitude rather than a policy, maybe it’s just in your team and not yet in your overall organisation. It doesn’t matter – every sign we have of improvement in diversity is worth noting.
So I want you to look for an opportunity today or tomorrow or back at the office, to share your thing, your secret sauce.
Perhaps you can do that with someone new, who you haven’t spoken with before.
Second, I have a task for when someone tells you about something good that’s happening in their organisation.
Well, of course you can tuck that away as it may well be helpful in your workplace too. But also: tell that person they are doing a great job.
Lift them up.
Being a woman – especially in the traditional spheres of the energy sector – may feel impossible at times. So whenever there is an opportunity to build someone up and support them, take that opportunity.
Do what I hope I’ve just done in this speech – share specific examples and tell people they are great.
Change is not only possible: I think it’s inevitable.
And a good part of that inevitable change belongs to the expansion of renewable energy organisations that already lead the way in gender inclusion.
I hope you can all find ways to nurture and bring the culture of diversity and inclusion with you across the sector as you grow.
Thank you.