Women in manufacturing – AMWU and Viva Energy, Women in Trades

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I’m in my third year as an electrical and instrumentation apprenticeship.

I’ve worked in the NT government as an administration person, in the construction field, and then said, okay, well, I want to be out there being hands on not being stuck at a desk in the typical gender role.

Our apprenticeship scheme at the moment with Viva is actually 50/50 gender equality. Gender equality is a really important part of our Diversity and Inclusion program because we want to ensure that we’re providing really good opportunities for women to belong, grow and thrive in our organisation.

Our unions been around for a long, long time, it’s mainly been a male dominated union. Some time ago we decided to get more women into the industries because the pool of tradesmen is very small now, we’ve got an older workforce, so thats now opened up the door for women to get involved, it does sort of open their eyes up saying, well actually I never thought of working in a refinery.

We had around 5% of our population being female and we set ourselves a goal of working towards 40%. When we now look at our cohort of operators that have been with us for up to five years of service, we now have 42% of that population are women.

Where I first started out it was very inappropriate and very uncomfortable, which is definitely changed now.

As a female, you’re valued, appreciated and respected for our thoughts. So definitely a lot has changed just in the last eight years.

Having fresh thinking and bringing a different perspective to some of the complex challenges that we have here, it makes us better, and that’s from a technical point of view. More diversity and different perspectives also means that we find better ways of working with each other.

There’s a lot of pathways and support to help teenagers and women to get into this field whilst doing a VCE subject.

We’ve been around a lot of schools now and talking to young women around getting into the trades and opening your eyes to it. And encourage more young women to pursue careers within trades.

The message I give to the girls coming through high school into an early career is, you’ve got the work life balance and it pays well.

You can support yourself and be independent from the hard work that you do.

Updated 7 October 2024

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Women in manufacturing – AMWU and Viva Energy, Women in Trades

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