This year’s Annual Convention and Exhibition will feature a special forum titled “Pioneering Women in Petroleum Geology,” which will be held April 1 in the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.
The forum will celebrate the many women who paved their way through history while building a foundation for women in geoscience today.
Robbie Gries, an organizer of the event and member of the Professional Women in Earth Sciences Special Interest Group (PROWESS SIG), said she feels that it’s important to share the stories of these women, since so many have been lost in history.
The forum will include four panels presented by a variety of expert speakers. Each will begin with a portion of a new documentary, titled “Rock Stars: Pioneering Women in Petroleum Geology,” followed by presentations and discussion.
The topics will focus on the earliest women in the field, the managers, the first well site women and micropaleontology pioneers, as well as the impact that World War II, the military and the years following the war had on the women.
In addition, a keynote presentation will be made over lunch and there will be plenty of opportunities for networking during the event.
To add a little flare to the forum, a costume contest has also been planned. AAPG’s Young Professionals Special Interest Group developed the idea, Gries explained, to “encourage everyone to dress in an era while representing women from the early 1900s, women in WWII, women in the 1950s, the 1970s and the ‘Dress For Success’ 1980s.”
A “Celebration Wall” will be displayed just outside the forum, in easy view of the rest of the Convention.
“The wall will be an awesome display of 100 of the earliest female petroleum geologists, who overcame enormous barriers and developed an amazing path for those who followed in their footsteps,” said Gries.
She said the event brings attention to an important aspect of the history of AAPG and of petroleum geology.
“The women in our history deserve to be remembered and honored. And if we know more about them, we can appreciate their accomplishments for the better and can learn from their struggles and their successes,” she said.
To that end, Gries and fellow volunteers have been working on a book, “Anomalies: Pioneering Women in Petroleum Geology: 1917 to 2017.” It chronicles the lives of the women through memories that were shared by their family and friends. The book will be released during the forum.
The event is made possible by the collaboration and support of AAPG’s PROWESS SIG, the Association of Women Geoscientists and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists Women’s Network Committee.
For more information about the forum, visit http://aapg.to/ace2017100.