Careers News

International Women’s Day

Schlumberger’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion discusses the actions the company’s taking to achieve gender balance

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day—gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow—is closely aligned with Schlumberger’s core values. Discover some of the inspiring women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) working at Schlumberger here.

In this article, Leila Hamza, Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Schlumberger, discusses the company’s commitment to improving gender balance.

“Schlumberger is striving to achieve 25% women in its salaried workforce by 2025, and 30% by 2030,” says Hamza. “It starts with hiring. We need to be attractive to all STEM talent regardless of the dimension of diversity—including women. 48% of our STEM graduate hires in 2021 were women,” she notes. “However, recruiting is only part of the story.”

“This is not just about numbers,” she adds. “We are committed to meeting the needs of future generations of women in the workplace and to positively impacting the countries in which we live and work by offering equal opportunities for challenging and fulfilling careers for women.”

Schlumberger has always provided opportunities based on performance and has a strong culture of promoting from within. In what remains a predominantly male industry, the company is committed to achieving gender balance.

“We have systematic processes and digital tools to both monitor gender diversity and mitigate any bias—an example is the selection of our candidate pool for leadership succession planning, where gender diversity is measured and compared with the rest of the population to identify and address potential bias,” she says, “We also leverage data and analytics to help us to monitor progress and to identify possible trends so that we can take actions to address them.”

“This year we’re building on the existing opportunities for managers and all employees to develop an awareness of their exclusionary work practices and to drive a more inclusive culture,” continues Hamza.

“We’re helping our managers to develop the skills and confidence to encourage true gender partnership in their teams and in the wider workplace. We want every employee in the company to feel shared accountability to progress diversity and inclusion.”

To support broader inclusion aims, Schlumberger has internal diversity employee resource groups. The group Connect Women and its subsection Men For Change are advocates of gender balance and to promoting gender partnership.

“We’re working on providing greater flexibility in working patterns at scale so all our employees can have better work-life balance,” explains Hamza. “We encourage transparency regarding employee personal considerations, career preferences, and regular career conversations.”

“Last year we also introduced career paths for engineers in remote operations,” she details, “We are hiring fresh out engineers who train in remote operations from day one, without the need to spend significant time in the field. This provides us with an alternative work model that can be scalable to employees who are excited by the technical challenges we offer but do not have the flexibility to travel to field locations.”

Schlumberger is committed to be an industry leader in gender balance. The company has strengthened its focus on placing women in senior management roles as part of this commitment.

“Ultimately, to achieve gender balance companies need to evolve from diversity and inclusion being a series of programs and initiatives to being embedded across the organization—and we need to work together internally and with external partners to achieve this. That’s our aim in Schlumberger,” explains Hamza.

The company’s gender balance initiatives are aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals #5 and #10. Learn more about the company’s workforce diversity here.