President's column For my thirteenth and final column as SPE president, I saved the subject that I am asked about most often. After every speech, I am asked some form of “the woman question.” What’s it been like to be a woman in the oil and gas industry? How do you manage work/life balance? Are there opportunities for women in our industry? I am the fourth woman SPE president, but it has been 11 years since the last one, making me the only female president of this generation. So, I make a point to be visible to the technical women in our industry and give them my frank perspective on what my journey has been like. I vividly remember 4 November 1980—as Ronald Reagan was announced as the newly elected US president, I was eating dinner at the old Petroleum Club in Midland, Texas. I was in town for a job interview, and it was the first time I had dinner with a table of executives who were evaluating me. The club was about to move from the old mansion to a modern facility, but the Petroleum Club was still stuck in the past—women were not allowed to join. I had just turned 21, had a month until I graduated with my petroleum engineering degree, and was ready to embark on my long career. I thought that the 1970s women’s rights movement had changed the workplace for all of us and that the “gender wars” were over. I was wrong. What is it like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry? I can’t think of any profession that isn’t male-dominated, except perhaps nurses, teachers, and social workers. Most workplaces are predominantly male, so women must learn to work within that environment. Women in the oil industry must be at least as—and usually more—competent than their male colleagues. To succeed or even just survive, we must learn to speak “their language” and act in a more “male way” at work. I believe that is where the stress comes in, where women must constantly shift between their more “female” socialized roles at home and a more “male” work environment—much like speaking one language at work and a different language at home. The switching gets easier, but it’s never completely seamless. Why is the oil and gas industry so hard on women? It’s not just my opinion that the oil industry is significantly harder on women than most other industries; studies prove it. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org partnered in a comprehensive study of the state of women in corporate America, Women in the Workplace 2016.