Women in Oil and Gas: Workforce Statistics, Leadership Pipeline, and Development Programs (2026)

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The oil and gas industry remains one of the most gender-imbalanced major industries in the world — and in 2026, the data show that gap closing at a pace that should concern every executive responsible for talent strategy. Women make up 48% of the global labor force but just 22% of the oil and gas workforce. They hold fewer than 15% of senior management roles in the energy sector. They earn almost 15% less than men at equivalent skill levels. And at the SVP level — the final critical rung before the C-suite — women in oil and gas leave the industry at nearly three times the rate of men.

None of those numbers are new. What is new in 2026 is what is being done about them. A generation of targeted leadership development programs is maturing, major operators from ADNOC to BP are publishing measurable diversity commitments and — in some cases — actually meeting them, and the industry’s deepening skills crisis is forcing a recognition that excluding half the talent pool is no longer affordable. This article compiles the most current verified statistics from the IEA Gender and Energy Data Explorer (2025), BCG’s Untapped Reserves 2.0 report, McKinsey’s O&G gender research, and the WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2025, alongside the programs and initiatives that are demonstrably making a difference.

Key Takeaways

Women account for just 22% of the oil and gas workforce globally — one of the lowest inclusion ratios of any major industry, ahead of only construction at 11% (BCG / IEA, 2025).
From 2021 to 2023, women’s share of the oil and gas workforce increased by only 1 percentage point — from 22% to 23% — indicating near-zero structural momentum despite widespread public commitments (BCG / ADIPEC analysis, 2024).
Wages for women in the energy sector are almost 15% lower than for men at the same skill levels — a gap driven primarily by occupational sorting into lower-paying firms and roles rather than discrimination within firms (IEA Spotlight, 2024).
Women hold fewer than 15% of senior management positions in the energy sector globally, and only about 11% of energy sector startup founders are women — far below the 18% outside the sector (IEA Gender and Energy Data Explorer, 2025).
Female representation varies dramatically by function: only 4% of oilfield services workers are women and just 15% in upstream exploration, while corporate functions reach 43% — but most of those roles sit in administrative and support categories (BCG Untapped Reserves 2.0).
At the SVP level, 269 women leave for every 100 men — nearly three times the male attrition rate at that career stage, and a pattern unique to oil and gas compared with other STEM industries (McKinsey).
Female participation in oil and gas declines 31% from entry level to manager roles, compared to a 22% decline in other STEM industries and 20% in the broader corporate workforce (McKinsey).
Companies with women in senior management in the energy sector are 15% more likely to have above-average financial returns (McKinsey Diversity Matters research).
Asia-Pacific leads regionally with 27% female workforce representation in energy companies, followed by Central and South America at 26% and North America at 25%, while the Middle East and Africa record 20% (BCG survey data, 2024).
93% of energy companies now have anti-sexual harassment policies and 91% have anti-discrimination policies in place — compared to 90% and lower baselines in 2017 (BCG Untapped Reserves 2.0).
The Women’s Global Leadership Conference in Energy (WGLC 2026) will take place on October 28–29, 2026 in Houston — the 22nd annual event and the largest women’s gathering in the energy industry.

1. Women in Oil and Gas: The Global Workforce Picture (2025–2026)

Overall Representation — Near-Static Despite Commitments

Women represent 22% of the oil and gas workforce globally — a figure that has barely moved over the past decade, and one that places the industry second from last among all major industries globally. Only construction, where women make up 11% of workers, ranks lower. For context, finance has achieved 39% female representation and health and social work stands at 60%.

The BCG and ADIPEC analysis published in early 2024 found that between 2021 and 2023, women’s share of the oil and gas workforce increased by just one percentage point — from 22% to 23%. That rate of change, if continued, would bring the sector to gender parity sometime in the early 22nd century. BCG’s report frames this as a business risk: “We use the term ‘Untapped Reserves’ to remind leaders that, like undeveloped energy sources, women and other underrepresented groups represent an enormous potential resource.”

The IEA World Energy Employment 2025 report puts the broader energy sector at approximately 20% female, noting that targeted efforts to attract more women into technical and vocational fields — where they currently make up less than 5% of workers — represent “one of the most impactful levers to increase overall female participation in the energy sector.” This is especially urgent given that we documented in our oil and gas industry employment statistics analysis that the sector is currently experiencing a deep skills shortage, with more than half of energy companies reporting critical hiring bottlenecks and 2.4 workers nearing retirement for every new entrant under 25 in advanced economies.

Sources: IEA — Energy and Gender Data Explorer (2025) | ADIPEC / BCG — Female Representation in the Energy Sector Still Lags (January 2024) | IEA World Energy Employment 2025 — Executive Summary

Representation by Sub-Sector and Role Type

Within oil and gas, female representation is not distributed evenly — it clusters heavily in certain functions while remaining near-invisible in others, and this distribution has major implications for career trajectories and pay.

The BCG Untapped Reserves 2.0 study, the most comprehensive dataset tracking this breakdown, reported the following female representation rates by function:

Function / Sub-Sector	Female Representation	Notes
Corporate / administrative functions	43%	Closest to parity; skewed toward support roles
Downstream / refining	~25–30%	Higher at global majors (ExxonMobil, BP ~30%)
Upstream exploration	15%	Remote locations and relocation expectations are key barriers
Oilfield services	4%	Lowest of any O&G sub-sector; field-intensive roles
Asian refiners (Reliance, S-Oil, Idemitsu)	Below 10%	Bloomberg data; far below global majors
Overall O&G industry (global average)	22–23%	BCG / IEA, 2023–2025 data

Note: “Corporate functions” near-parity figure is largely driven by administrative, HR, legal, and communications roles — the roles with the lowest average compensation in the sector. Women’s underrepresentation in technical and operational roles, which carry the highest salaries and fastest promotion tracks, is the core structural challenge.

Source: BCG / World Petroleum Council — Untapped Reserves 2.0: Driving Gender Balance in Oil and Gas | World Oil / Bloomberg — Women Represent Growing Segment of O&G Workforce

Regional Breakdown

Female representation in oil and gas also varies significantly by region, reflecting different regulatory environments, cultural norms, and the composition of the industry in each geography. BCG’s survey of energy companies found the following regional averages:

Asia-Pacific: 27% — regional leader, partly reflecting stronger diversity regulation in countries like Australia and New Zealand
Central and South America: 26% — driven by national oil companies with formal diversity mandates in Brazil and Colombia
North America: 25% — relatively high for majors, though oilfield services drag the average down
Europe: ~22–24% — varies significantly by company; BP and Shell at the higher end, many smaller operators much lower
Middle East and Africa: 20% — improving, particularly in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, though starting from a much lower base

Source: Consultancy Middle East — Global Oil & Gas Sector Struggles with Advancing Diversity Agenda (citing BCG survey data)

2. The Leadership Pipeline: Where Women Are Lost

Entry Level to Manager: The First and Biggest Drop

McKinsey’s research on gender dynamics in oil and gas is the most granular available for understanding where the leadership pipeline leaks. The findings are stark: female participation in oil and gas declines 31% from entry-level roles to manager roles. In other STEM industries, the comparable decline is 22%. In the broader corporate workforce, it is 20%. That 9-percentage-point gap between oil and gas and the rest of STEM reflects a problem that is specific to this industry, not simply a general gender challenge.

Why does oil and gas lose so many women between entry level and management? McKinsey’s research identifies a common structural factor: the industry’s expectation that international or remote assignments are prerequisites for promotion. This creates a significant career barrier for women at the life stage when many are starting or raising families — a barrier that is structurally imposed rather than reflecting any difference in competence or ambition. O&G operations centers are frequently in remote or otherwise unappealing locations, and the culture of physical presence and relocation has been slow to change even as the pandemic demonstrated that many roles can be performed differently.

The BCG data corroborates this at the numbers level: among 100 women who enter oil and gas at entry level, only 39% are in the pipeline at entry-level management, dropping to 28% at mid-management and 20% at senior management. The pipeline is narrow at the top not because women fail to qualify, but because the system filters them out at each transition point.

Source: McKinsey — How Women Can Help Fill the Oil and Gas Industry’s Talent Gap

The SVP Attrition Problem

The most alarming single statistic in McKinsey’s oil and gas gender research is the SVP attrition figure: 269 women leave for every 100 men at the SVP level. This pattern — nearly three times the male attrition rate at the final rung before the C-suite — is unique to oil and gas. In other STEM industries, attrition rates at SVP are equal for men and women. In the broader corporate workforce, women actually leave at lower rates than men at this level.

The most likely explanation, supported by executive interviews in McKinsey’s research, is a “ceiling effect”: women who reach SVP and perceive that further advancement is effectively closed to them make a rational calculation to leave — either to other sectors where their seniority will be recognized, or to start their own ventures. One former chairman and board director of several O&G companies told McKinsey: “Women who get promoted to SVP and think they won’t get promoted beyond that leave earlier rather than later.”

This dynamic connects directly to the broader succession planning challenge facing the industry. The inability to retain women through the SVP stage is not simply a diversity metric failure — it represents a loss of experienced, senior-level talent that is enormously expensive to replace and damaging to organizational continuity. Our analysis of the real cost of poor succession planning shows how leadership attrition at the senior level compounds across a 3–5 year window in ways most organizations significantly underestimate.

The Oil and Gas Leadership Pipeline by Gender (2024–2025)

Career Level	Women’s Share (O&G)	Women’s Share (Other STEM)	O&G Drop vs Entry Level
Entry level	~39%	~45%	—
Manager	~27%	~35%	-31%
Senior manager / director	~20%	~27%	-49%
VP / SVP	~13%	~20%	-67%
C-suite / executive committee	~10–15%	~18%	-72%+

Sources: McKinsey O&G gender research; BCG Untapped Reserves 2.0; IEA Gender and Energy Data Explorer 2025. Figures represent approximate industry-wide averages — individual companies vary significantly.

3. The Gender Pay Gap in Oil and Gas

The pay gap between men and women in oil and gas operates through two distinct mechanisms, and understanding both matters for designing effective interventions.

The first is the within-firm pay gap — differences in compensation between men and women doing equivalent jobs at the same organization. The IEA’s research suggests this component exists but is not the dominant driver of the overall gap. Companies are increasingly monitoring and reporting on within-grade pay differences, and the legal and reputational risks of overt pay discrimination have pushed most major operators toward at least nominal pay equity at equivalent levels.

The second and more significant driver is occupational sorting — the concentration of women in lower-paying firms, lower-paying sub-sectors, and lower-paying role types. According to the IEA’s Gender Gaps in the Energy Sector spotlight analysis, wages for women in the energy sector are almost 15% lower than for men at the same skill level, and the dominant explanation is sorting: women cluster in administrative and support functions, in smaller firms, and in sub-sectors (such as renewable energy) that pay less on average than upstream oil and gas extraction.

This sorting effect is itself a product of the structural barriers documented earlier. If women are disproportionately filtered out of technical and operational roles — the roles that lead to upstream careers and field operations — they will disproportionately end up in the lower-paying parts of the energy economy. Addressing the pay gap, therefore, is not primarily about equal pay audits (though those remain necessary). It is about opening the technical and operational pathways that lead to the highest-paying roles in the first place.

Within the United States specifically, the Department of Energy notes that the average annual pay for a full-time working woman is 84% of a man’s salary across the energy sector broadly, with gaps for women of color significantly larger — the gap between Black women and white men is 37 cents, and between Indigenous women and white men is 42 cents. A 2020 analysis found that 42% of the variation between men’s and women’s wages in energy can be explained by occupational segregation.

For organizations seeking to understand and act on their own pay equity data in real time, the HR analytics dashboards now used by leading people managers provide the infrastructure to identify compensation disparities at the team and grade level before they compound into systemic inequality.

Sources: IEA — Understanding Gender Gaps in the Energy Sector (Spotlight, 2024) | IEA — Understanding Gender Gaps in Wages, Employment and Career Trajectories in the Energy Sector | US Department of Energy — Eliminating the Gender Wage Gap in Energy Sector Jobs

4. The Business Case: Why This Is a Performance Issue, Not Just a Values Issue

The business case for closing the gender gap in oil and gas has been documented extensively enough that rehearsing it in full here would be redundant. A few numbers are worth stating plainly, however, because they frame the leadership development programs covered in the next section as investments with measurable returns rather than costs with social benefits.

McKinsey’s Diversity Matters research found that companies in the top quartile for women in leadership are 15% more likely to have above-industry-average financial returns. BCG research has found that the most significant gains in innovation are achieved by diverse leadership teams — particularly relevant in an industry navigating both the energy transition and the digital transformation simultaneously. Harvard Business Review’s research on gender diversity in the energy sector found that the most productive companies were also the ones with the highest levels of gender diversity, attributing this to a combination of better decision-making, stronger signaling of competence to investors, and elevated collaboration.

The skills crisis context amplifies all of this. As detailed in the IEA World Energy Employment 2025 data, the oil and gas sector added nearly 600,000 jobs in 2023 and continues to face significant gaps in technical and operational roles. Leadership training ROI research from McKinsey and Gartner consistently shows that investments in structured development deliver measurable returns — and those returns are highest for programs targeted at groups with historically limited access to development resources. For oil and gas, that means women in technical and operational pipelines represent one of the highest-ROI pools for leadership development investment available today.

O&G companies that fail to address the talent pipeline will increasingly compete for a shrinking pool of traditionally male candidates in an aging sector while the talent they are losing to other industries — particularly the fast-growing renewables and technology sectors — is precisely the technically capable, highly educated talent they need most. As one O&G executive told McKinsey: “By 2025, we are going to be a millennial and Generation Z workforce that is inclusive and diverse. If your business is not, you are going to get bottom-of-the-barrel workers.”

5. Company-Level Benchmarks: Who Is Leading and What Are They Doing?

BP — First Major Oil Company with a Female Executive Majority

BP has arguably made the most documented public progress on gender representation among international oil majors. In 2022, BP reached a significant milestone: more women than men joined its top executive group, making it the first major oil company to achieve a female majority in its senior executive team — six women and five men. By 2023, its Administrative Council had three women and one man.

BP’s 2030 targets are explicit: women to hold 50% of its 400 leadership roles, and to make up 40% of employees at every other level. The mechanisms behind these numbers include on-site childcare centers at select facilities, health insurance for employees’ parents, flexible work arrangements, and structured mentorship for women targeting technical and field roles. BP’s approach reflects a recognition that gender equity in operations-heavy industries requires infrastructure investment, not just recruitment rhetoric.

ADNOC — Exceeding Its Own Diversity Pledges

Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has been among the more transparent major NOCs in publishing and tracking diversity commitments. According to BCG’s Untapped Reserves 2.0 research, ADNOC exceeded all of its formal diversity pledges: the company had three female CEOs across its group of operating companies (versus a target of one), 18% of senior managers were women (versus a target of 15%), and 30% of new Emirati joiners were women. ADNOC was also the first funder of Pathway20 — a UAE-based initiative designed to increase female board representation at locally listed companies to 20%, providing women with support during their first board appointment.

Fatema Mohamed Al Nuaimi, CEO of ADNOC Gas — an ADX-listed company with a market capitalization above $70 billion — is among the most senior female executives in the global energy industry, and her visibility reflects ADNOC’s genuine commitment to representation at the top rather than just the middle of the organization.

ExxonMobil — Scale Representation Without Depth

ExxonMobil reports approximately 30% female workforce representation overall — above the industry average — but critics note that this headline figure masks significant concentration in administrative and corporate functions rather than technical and operational roles. ExxonMobil has formal diversity programs and publishes ESG metrics, but its senior leadership remains male-dominated compared to BP. The gap between workforce-level representation and leadership-level representation is a common pattern at large US majors, reflecting the pipeline leakage documented in McKinsey’s research.

Shell and TotalEnergies — Global Programs With Regional Variation

Shell’s global workforce is approximately 24–28% female, with significant regional variation. Its strongest representation has historically been in Europe and Oceania, while Asia-Pacific operations have lagged. Shell operates several structured women’s development initiatives including mentoring circles, returnship programs for women re-entering after career breaks, and partnerships with engineering schools for early-career pipeline development.

TotalEnergies has similarly set formal diversity targets, committing to 25% women in management by 2025 and 35% by 2030. As of their most recent published sustainability data, they were tracking toward these numbers in Europe and the Americas but behind in Middle East and African operations.

Sources: Change In Content — Women at BP: Inside the Oil Giant Trying to Rewrite the Gender Story (November 2025) | BCG / WPC — Untapped Reserves 2.0 (December 2021) | ADNOC Gas — Executive Management

6. Development Programs That Are Moving the Needle

The most important question in this space is not “what are the statistics?” but “what is actually working?” Below is a structured review of the programs, initiatives, and organizational practices with the strongest evidence base for improving women’s representation, retention, and advancement in oil and gas.

Women’s Global Leadership Conference in Energy (WGLC)

Now in its 22nd year, the Women’s Global Leadership Conference in Energy is the largest women’s professional development event in the energy industry. Organized by Gulf Energy Information and held annually in Houston, WGLC 2026 takes place on October 28–29 at the Marriott Marquis Houston. The 2026 program is built around the theme “Powering Energy Forward” — examining how influence is built, how careers are intentionally shaped, and how inclusive high-performing teams drive sustainable success. It draws participants from oil, gas, and the broader energy value chain, covering leadership, digital transformation, resilience, and career acceleration.

The WGLC is not just a networking event — it functions as a benchmark for where the industry’s conversation on women in leadership is focused in any given year. Its consistently high attendance from senior executives at majors and NOCs alike makes it a meaningful signal of executive-level commitment.

BCG’s Four High-Impact DEI Practices

BCG’s Untapped Reserves 2.0 research identified four specific organizational practices most strongly linked to increased representation of women in senior leadership positions in oil and gas. These are worth stating precisely, because the research is based on data from across the global industry rather than on aspirational frameworks:

Work-life balance policies that actually work in field operations — not just on-paper flexibility, but structural changes to shift patterns, remote monitoring roles, and operational designs that allow technical careers to be maintained through family-formation years.
Equitable promotion practices — standardized criteria, structured calibration sessions, and explicit monitoring of promotion rates by gender at each career transition.
Visible commitment from senior leadership — not boilerplate diversity statements, but personal sponsorship of women in the pipeline by C-suite leaders, public accountability for diversity targets, and inclusion of diversity metrics in leadership performance reviews.
Targeted recruiting efforts — active outreach to engineering schools, community colleges, and vocational programs with high female enrollment; structured internship pipelines; removal of language and imagery in job postings that signal a male default.

IEA / CEM EIGE Initiative

The IEA and Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) co-organize the Equal by 30 initiative — formerly C3E International — which is focused specifically on accelerating gender equality and diversity in clean energy transitions and closing the energy gender gap by 2030. The initiative works across three pillars: improving gender-disaggregated data in the energy sector, honoring women in energy leadership roles, and elevating best practices and policies through its network of 6,000 experts. More than 100 companies and governments have signed the Equal by 30 Campaign pledge, committing to specific actions on equal pay, equal leadership, and equal opportunities in the clean energy sector by 2030.

The Women in Oil and Gas Association (WOGA)

The Women in Oil and Gas Association (WOGA), a non-profit established in 2013, focuses on mentorship, encouragement, and professional development for women across all levels of the oil and gas industry. Unlike conference-based models, WOGA’s primary mechanism is year-round mentorship pairing and networking events, giving it a sustained development impact rather than episodic engagement. WOGA’s emphasis on building synergies through collective intelligence reflects a model that is gaining evidence support — structured peer networks have been shown in leadership development research to be among the most effective retention mechanisms for women in male-dominated industries.

ADIPEC Women in Energy

ADIPEC — the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference — includes an annual Women in Energy Conference as a core component of its programming, running alongside ADIPEC 2026 on November 2–5, 2026 in Abu Dhabi. The ADIPEC Women in Energy platform is particularly significant for the Middle East and Africa region, where female representation in oil and gas lags most other regions at 20%, and where national operator commitments (ADNOC in the UAE, Saudi Aramco’s Saudization programs, and Saudi Vision 2030’s target of 30% female labor force participation) are driving real change from the top.

Professional Certification as a Career Accelerator

For individual women seeking to advance in oil and gas, structured professional certification remains one of the most effective tools for building the technical credibility that field and operations roles require. The sectors where women are most underrepresented — upstream, oilfield services, and offshore — are precisely those where technical credentials carry the most weight in promotion decisions. Programs like the Offshore Oil and Gas Engineering Certification Program develop the core technical competencies that open access to these career paths, while the Global Downstream Oil and Gas Operations certification provides the foundational knowledge for careers in refining, petrochemicals, and the downstream value chain — areas where female representation is higher and advancement opportunities are growing.

For those targeting the LNG sector specifically — which offers some of the most stable long-term employment in the industry given Qatar’s North Field expansion and the US LNG export boom — the LNG Plant Operator Certification is the most directly applicable technical credential for operations and facility management roles.

7. The Energy Transition Opportunity

One dimension of the women-in-oil-and-gas conversation that rarely receives the attention it deserves is the energy transition itself. As operators increasingly invest in low-carbon technologies — hydrogen, offshore wind, carbon capture, and energy storage — they are creating roles that do not carry the same cultural baggage as traditional upstream oil and gas. These roles are actively seeking diverse candidates, are more likely to be based in accessible locations rather than remote field sites, and are subject to stronger ESG disclosure requirements that create accountability for diversity progress.

The IEA notes that renewable energy already has higher female representation than oil and gas — solar PV at 40% female and renewables broadly at 32% — and that the fastest-growing job categories in the energy sector are those where women’s representation is highest. As oil and gas companies build renewables and low-carbon portfolios, the cultural and structural barriers that have historically constrained women’s participation in the sector begin to weaken.

For women already in oil and gas careers, the transition also creates new pathways. The broader data on male vs female employment statistics shows that women are disproportionately concentrated in sectors facing structural transformation — and those who proactively build skills that bridge conventional and emerging energy roles are best positioned to capture the career opportunities that transformation creates. The IEA estimates that approximately 50% of energy sector jobs created by 2030 will not be geographically bound, making remote and flexible work structures more viable and removing one of the most persistent structural barriers to women’s participation in field-intensive industries.

8. Frequently Asked Questions: Women in Oil and Gas

What percentage of oil and gas workers are women in 2025?

Women account for approximately 22–23% of the global oil and gas workforce — one of the lowest ratios of any major industry globally, ahead of only construction at 11% (BCG / IEA, 2023–2025 data). The figure increased by just 1 percentage point between 2021 and 2023, indicating near-zero structural momentum despite widespread industry commitments to diversity.

What is the gender pay gap in oil and gas?

Wages for women in the energy sector are almost 15% lower than for men at the same skill levels (IEA Spotlight, 2024). The dominant driver is occupational sorting — women cluster in lower-paying functions, smaller firms, and sub-sectors with lower average compensation — rather than within-firm discrimination at equivalent grades. In the United States, full-time working women in the energy sector earn approximately 84 cents for every dollar earned by men (Department of Energy).

What percentage of senior managers in oil and gas are women?

Fewer than 15% of senior managers in the energy sector are women globally (IEA Gender and Energy Data Explorer, 2025). In oil and gas specifically, women’s share of the leadership pipeline drops from roughly 39% at entry level to approximately 13% at VP/SVP level — a decline of 67% through the career ladder. Only about 10–15% of C-suite positions in major oil and gas companies are held by women.

Why do so many women leave oil and gas at the SVP level?

McKinsey’s research found that 269 women leave for every 100 men at the SVP level in oil and gas — nearly three times the male attrition rate at that stage. The most widely cited explanation is a “ceiling effect”: women who reach SVP perceive that advancement to the C-suite is effectively closed to them and choose to leave rather than wait for a promotion that may never come. This pattern is unique to oil and gas; in other STEM industries, SVP attrition rates are equal between men and women.

Which oil and gas companies have the best gender diversity track records?

Based on publicly available data and BCG’s research, BP and ADNOC stand out for measurable, verified progress. BP became the first major oil company to achieve a female majority in its top executive group in 2022. ADNOC exceeded all of its formal diversity pledges as of BCG’s last published assessment, with three female CEOs across its group of operating companies. Among international majors, ExxonMobil and Shell report approximately 25–30% female workforce representation overall, though this figure masks concentration in administrative rather than technical and operational roles.

What are the best development programs for women in oil and gas?

The most impactful programs identified by BCG’s research combine four elements: work-life balance infrastructure in field operations, equitable promotion practices with standardized criteria, visible C-suite sponsorship, and targeted recruiting from engineering and vocational programs. Leading annual events include the Women’s Global Leadership Conference in Energy (WGLC), held in Houston each October, and the ADIPEC Women in Energy Conference in Abu Dhabi each November. For individual career development, structured technical certification in the most underrepresented specializations — offshore engineering, LNG operations, and downstream — is consistently the most effective accelerator for women targeting senior roles.

Primary Sources and References

This article is intended for informational purposes. All statistics are attributed to their primary data publishers and should be independently verified before use in research, policy, or commercial contexts. Data reflects information available as of March 2026. Where BCG Untapped Reserves 2.0 data (December 2021) is cited, no more recent BCG sector-wide dataset was available at the time of publication — readers should check for any updated BCG / World Petroleum Council releases.

Joshna

Joshna Dsouza is a Training Operations Specialist with 12+ years of experience in course development and content quality management at Zoe Talent Solutions. She specializes in creating accessible, practical content on HR, office administration, CRM, and workplace soft skills. Known for her meticulous attention to detail and operational expertise, she bridges real-world training needs with clear, learner-focused resources.