Women in the Power Sector

April 07, 2021

What is it like to be a woman working in the energy sector and what are the challenges that women face? To unpack dimensions of the gender gap in the power sector, a program was organized on the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2021, by Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai and the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University School of International Studies and Public Affairs (SIPA). The program featured an online screening of the award-winning documentary film, Powerless, and a panel discussion with experts from the Columbia community. 

Women are mostly invisible from the energy matrix, observed Dr. Philip Benoit, Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at CGEP, in a presentation that showed how women’s invisibility contributes to their disempowerment and exclusion from the benefits of development programs. 

The underrepresentation of women at every level of employment in the energy sector was a common concern shared by the panelists. Laurie Fitzmaurice, Executive Director of CGEP, argued that women’s involvement in technological fields like energy is abysmally low as compared to administrative jobs. Despite making up 48% of the global labor force, women only account for 22% of the traditional energy sector. For management levels, the numbers are even lower.  

Vaishali Sinha, Chief Sustainability, CSR and Communication Officer at ReNew Power, one of India’s largest renewable energy companies, and an alumna of SIPA, discussed the challenges that women face in the workplace. Reflecting on her own journey in the energy sector, she shared that despite initial hardships, it was finding an entry point that complemented her set of skills and her ‘never say never' attitude that helped considerably. While acknowledging the gradual acceptance of women in the sector, she admitted that there are very few women in leadership positions and that there are multiple biases and fewer funding opportunities to support women's ventures. 

The complex challenges faced by women working in the energy sector are showcased in the film Powerless that was co-directed by Deepti Kakkar, who is also a SIPA alumna. Talking about her film, Ms. Kakkar focused on the struggles of one of the film’s two protagonists, Ritu Maheshwari, the first woman bureaucrat to be in charge of the Kanpur Electricity Supply Company Ltd. While trying to clean up corruption and loss of revenue due to power theft in the city of Kanpur, Ms. Maheshwari faced formidable opposition from male politicians and co-workers.  But even though she was eventually transferred, she shifted the perceptions of womens’ competency and soon after her tenure, the Kanpur District saw two other prominent bureaucrat positions taken by women officers.

All the panelists agreed that women should be at the core of planning and  their voices should be heard at every level for effective policy-making. They also emphasized that more training and work opportunities should be created for women, especially in growth and sunrise sectors like renewable energy, where employment could grow to 29 million jobs by the year 2050.