What's changed since the Women's Power List?

It’s been a year since we published our Women’s Power List for International Women’s Day in 2017. The idea was to mark the contribution of the most influential women in the wind industry. We're happy the report and event got such a good reaction.

It’s also no secret that we’re not repeating it in 2018. It would’ve been easy to put out a Women’s Power List again, but we didn’t want it to look like this was the only place where we were looking at the important issue of gender diversity in wind. We’re still taking steps to embed this throughout all of our reports and events.

However, if you liked last year’s, keep an eye on our 2019 plans.

And the one-year mark also seems a good time to take stock.

We’ve seen some exciting moves in the last 12 months. In last year’s report, our number one was Engie chief executive Isabelle Kocher – and it has been great to see more women stepping up to chief executive roles in major utilities in the last year: Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, Laura Beane and Lindsay McQuade have all done so. The appointment this week of Manon van Beek as chief executive of Tennet, the Dutch grid operator, is another interesting step.

And we've also become increasingly aware of the most influential women in the North American wind industry in the last couple of months too, as work on our upcoming North American Power List (due out on 29th May) continues at pace.

Even so, we shouldn't be complacent about gender diversity in the wind sector. The need to tell girls and women about the exciting careers available in wind is as important as it was this time last year. And businesses can also play an important role by providing supportive working practices that make it easier to keep top talent.

The International Renewable Energy Agency, for instance, has given us some interesting insights into gender diversity in wind.

In its fourth annual ‘Renewable Energy and Jobs’ report last May, IRENA reported that the number of jobs in the wind sector had grown 7% year-on-year to 1.2million driven by new installations in the US, Germany, India and Brazil. But it also said that gender discrimination was an issue in renewables, although to a lesser extent than in other parts of the energy sector.

For example, IRENA surveyed 90 renewable energy companies worldwide and said that women represented an average 35% of the workforce, which was higher than in the energy sector at large but lower than in the economy at large. Is that a problem? Not necessarily, but it should make firms think about whether there’s more that could be done to bring in talented women. Wind will benefit if it brings in the best people.

The IRENA report also said that women were less likely to take technical jobs due to biased perceptions of gender roles; and were less likely to hold management roles “due to the presence of a glass ceiling”. We may have a handful of recent examples of women taking top roles, but this shouldn’t mask a wider trend that men still hold most of wind's top jobs.

What can be done? Well, the suggestions are nothing new.

Respondents said that the ability to work flexibly and at home would help them, as would on-site childcare.

Making this available to mothers and fathers can help both parents share the burden of childcare more evenly, and therefore make it easier to retain women. Anecdotally, I can say that such flexibility in my job has helped me support my wife to return to work.

Not that this will work for everyone, of course. I work in an office that’s a short bike ride from my daughter’s school, which means I can pick her up from school in an emergency or work at home when needed. I wouldn’t be able to do any of that if my job involved working on top of a Siemens Gamesa turbine in the North Sea.

But, where appropriate, it makes sense for firms in the wind sector to do what they can to the support flexible working that could help them to retain the best people. It’s a win-win-win – for the employee, the company and the industry at large.