Monday, September 21, 2009

Women with energy in an energy hungry industry

While doing some research on companies that are involved in sustainable and renewable energy (part of my job searching), I stumbled upon an article written last summer by TheStar titled "Women with Energy". What a neat title! The article states:

The first-annual event, called Women of Energy, was also about highlighting the progress that women have made in the sector, and the need to build a support network that also encourages female ranks to grow.

Why now? The invitation to the event explained it simply: "For the first time in Canadian energy history, there are three female presidents at the leading energy utilities."

And all of these women are based in Ontario!










from left to right: Laura Formusa, president and chief executive officer of Hydro One. Janet Holder, president of Enbridge Gas Distribution. Julie Dill, president of Union Gas.

Not surprisingly, one of the first questions asked of Formusa – the only one of the power trio with children – was about balancing a career with being a mother. "We have to show our children that moms can do it without killing themselves. That's why a support network is so important," she says.

Enbridge's Holder says it's a network the energy sector has lacked. "It's hard for women to look inside their organization and find other women with a similar life and values." Enbridge, Union Gas and Hydro One have agreed to take turns hosting the annual event, with an eye to building the network across Canada.

Somebody pinch me, I think I'm dreaming. Definitely looking forward to looking into this some more as I am quite passionate about sustainable energy, female support networks, and having a leadership role.

1 comments:

Terri Oda said...

The pictures for this post (and the previous one about famous women) are showing up really huge in syndication. Is there anything we can do about this? I think the problem is that there's some sort of javascript trickery going on to make the images smaller, so we probably want to just use smaller images to save load times anyhow.