Women constitute 43% of the workforce at French energy major’s bunkering arm TotalEnergies Marine Fuels (TMF) and for its senior management team it is a 50-50 female-male split.
TMF’s vice president Louise Tricoire, who stepped into the top job at the company nine months ago, said she has been told that on average women currently make up around 10% of the workforce in the marine bunkering industry.
The VP also benchmarked this against a figure of almost 30% in shipping, from the International Maritime Organization-Women’s International Shipping & Trading Association’s study. “We are at 43% which is excellent,” she said.
Tricoire has been profiling some of the women in her 50-strong team in a series of monthly posts.
To date, these have included names like LNG and new fuels bunker trader Xin-Fang Chua, head of LNG bunkering department Dahlia Rifai, head of HSEQ and TMF technical department Mireille Franco and Laura Ong, who is head of bunker sales and operations for the company’s Asia Pacific department.
“We have some quite impressive women in the business units,” she said.
Tricoire also flagged up that the make-up of TMF’s 10-person senior management team is split equally between women and men.
She explained that parent TotalEnergies has an ambition to see women in 30% of senior management positions by 2025.
Tricoire said this means there is already “a proactive push” to recruit women, to identify those of high potential and position them for management positions.
It then becomes “a virtuous circle”, she explained, as a woman manager she will tend to increase the female workforce and gradually the numbers will grow.
“Having a diverse workforce makes for a more balanced company it is more a reflection of the world as it is,” Tricoire said. “From a personal perspective and for the people that work here it is more favourable.
“I think it is more creative, it is richer — you can benefit from the specificities of diversity which is good for business, for creativity, for collective intelligence. This is very positive for me.”
Tricoire also believes women are more engaged in transformation and decarbonisation themes so sees their role as key for TMF.
The TMF VP recently took on the role of sponsor in Singapore of TotalEnergies’ gender equality promotion network “twice” — TotalEnergies Women's Initiative for Communication and Exchange — and she is excited about this position.
This is worldwide network set up in 2006 to promote the career of women in the company. It is spread through 60 geographies and now has 4,000 members, who more recently have included some men too.
Colleagues speak about the “positive energy” and the inspiration of having a female lead. Tricoire is married with two children and enjoys an outdoor active lifestyle. Her next adventure is trip to climb Malaysia’s highest peak Mount Kinabalu — with a group of women.
