Despite substantial progress, industry women can still face surprise and skepticism


Most people, male or female, have to prove themselves on the job, demonstrating their depth of knowledge, their professionalism and their ability to solve problems. That’s normal, and as it should be.

However, many men would be taken aback if they felt the degree of skepticism that women often face when they first show up at a meeting or a construction site or a vessel to do their jobs — even after they’ve spent years proving that they know what they are doing.

It is not unusual for Olga Baez, president of NMT Projects International (Americas) Inc., to be “absolutely, positively” the only woman visible when she arrives on a job site. Men often assume that she can’t do the job or doesn’t know what she is talking about, although she has worked in the shipping industry for 23 years. “That has been a challenge within the project world,” she said.

How does she cope? “I just walk in and I ask the question I know I need to ask whether they may think it’s a stupid question or not. I think there are a lot of questions others would ask but they are afraid to. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I do what I need to do to get the job,” Baez said.

Jamilette De La Paz, vice president of liner services for BBC Chartering, said she sometimes experiences gender-related challenges when she is negotiating, particularly in Latin countries. “They will kind of be in shock. You can see it, without them expressing it,” she said.

Baez said something similar: “I feel it. They think I shouldn’t be there. It is so obvious. Maybe it’s our own fears that generate that thought, but you feel it. It’s in the room. You can cut it with a knife. But when I’m leaving I get the handshake, the pat on the back, the phone call that says ‘you impressed us.’”

She does not get tired of having to prove herself over and over, she said. Her work is not a game. It’s a privilege. And she is glad that she continues to excel and earn respect.

For her part, men sometimes assume that De La Paz will not be tough negotiator. “When you start to get a little tough — they don’t like it so much,” she said. “You get nervous; you are dealing with this male world and sometimes you find some tough cookies. (But) when you complete a meeting and you have succeeded in getting your point across, it’s satisfying. You can laugh at the end. It’s a rush to go into that difficult step and come out in a good position. It’s very rewarding. You start earning respect.”

Diana Hamm, traffic manager for engineering, procurement and construction firm Foster Wheeler USA Corp., spent 30 years in the freight forwarding industry before moving to the shipping side. “I always feel like I have to over-validate anything that I present” she said. “It’s not uncommon for me to be the only woman in a conference room with 20 men. I walk in, and I can tell from their faces that they are wondering what my role is, why I’m there. If I’m lucky, some man will know me and say ‘This is Diana Hamm, our traffic manager.’ ”

Hamm is often challenged on her knowledge of freight forwarding or shipping. “That’s fine. I don’t mind being challenged, although it can be annoying. Typically, I can win them over. As long as I stand confident and professional, I eventually get past those hurdles.”

Women may have to prove themselves more, at least when they first join the industry, agreed Fiona Stigter, project traffic and logistics manager with Bechtel Oil, Gas and Chemical. When she worked with a stevedoring firm, she knew that the men on board the vessels wondered if she could do her job. Ultimately, though, what matters is simply doing what you say you’ll do, she said.

“At a certain point, you stop thinking about these issues,” she said. Gender did not hold her back; “on the contrary, it probably made me stronger and gave me the belief that you can achieve whatever you want as long as you go for it 100 percent and don’t take anything for granted.”

These women have stuck with the shipping industry and made it work for them. They acknowledge the men who have helped and inspired them, as well. Stigter followed in the footsteps of her father, a heavy-lift shipping agent in the Netherlands. Hamm said that her father, Wayne Rickey, who owned a Houston-area trucking firm, opened the door to the shipping industry for her.

“I would not have imagined that this is where I would end up,” Hamm said. “Even my dad probably would not have foreseen how well I have done. I know he would have been proud. My father passed away 15 years ago. One of (his colleagues) from years ago contacted me at Foster Wheeler and said, ‘I wish your dad was here to see you now; he would be so proud of you.’ I like it when they tie me back to my dad. He taught me to be who I am today.”

In spite of all the challenges, Baez sees that women in the shipping industry have made concrete progress. “Now, so many women have started their own freight forwarding companies, are working in management, in the project world, in the engineering world: you see how many women are up at the top,” said Baez. “When I started, women were clerks, women were receptionists. We’ve come a long way, baby.”



Joyce Amador
Import manager and assistant vice president
Pentagon Freight Services

Joyce Amador received the call after hours, just as she was packing up to leave her office: A customer’s four gigantic oil-rig mini-stations, flown in from the U.K. and valued at $3 million, sat on a truck stranded in Lafayette, La. Officials at the destination address refused to take delivery.

“The trucker was panicky,” she said. But with more than 30 years in the industry, Amador was not. She made a series of phone calls to the Pentagon Freight office nearest the shipper in Aberdeen, Scotland; determined that the cargo had gone to the wrong address; and located the correct address and coordinated the delivery. “It all worked out. This is the exciting part of what we do,” she said.

Amador manages customs clearance for Pentagon, a freight forwarder serving the oil and gas industry. She and three others work on the import side of the company, which moves cargo that includes oil-rig machinery, mud pumps, drill collars and survey equipment.

She began her career at global freight forwarder Fritz Companies Inc. in 1973. Starting as a clerk, Amador eventually earned a customshouse license and handled commodities that included food and drugs, liquor and textiles. Her tenure at Fritz lasted until 2003, when UPS Supply Chains Solutions purchased the company.

Much has changed since she entered the industry, she said. In the early days, Amador grabbed a clipboard and headed for the docks when she needed to meet with an import specialist. “It was a bit more personal back then.”

Today, e-mail and phone calls have replaced face-to-face conversations. And new technology means Pentagon doesn’t have to hire out-of-state brokers to handle freight entering the country from Canada. Using remote location filing, Amador can sit in her office in Houston and clear cargo as far away as Sweetgrass, Mo., saving customers time and money.

“I like the feel of knowing by the end of the day, that I’ve done everything within my means to make a customer happy,” she said. 

— JEANETTE VALENTINE

Olga Baez
President
NMT Projects International (Americas) Inc.

“Anyone who is in the project business will tell you, it’s not an 8 to 5 job. It’s almost 24/7,” said Olga Baez, new appointed president with Houston-based freight forwarder NMT Projects International. She specializes in oil and gas-related cargo and in moving cranes and rigging. Her job can range from finding vessels to transport massive transformers or the cranes, trailers and towers needed for a large project to traveling to a jobsite to see a refinery that will be dismantled and moved halfway around the world.

Before joining NMT, Baez was ocean freight manager with Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. NMT was looking for someone for their new Houston office and some heavy-lift owners recommended her for the position, Baez said. Before Hellman, she worked for Stewart and Stevenson in the traffic department and in international finance. Her division built gas turbine generator sets and was eventually sold to GE.

During the buyout, she was demoted from an administrative position she’d held for many years because she does not have a college degree, Baez said. But that did not stop her upward progress.

“Every time I moved, I learned something new. I worked for the shipper, worked with financing, did some traffic for the petroleum division. Over the years, slowly and gradually, I learned in depth what each department did. It gave me a rounded overview of the complete process, from shipping to collecting money,” Baez said.

Now, Baez often trains newcomers, male and female. She urges them to go down to the docks and into the meetings “with the big boys.  Go out and learn. Handle it.” She often picks the girls, who can hang back, to travel. “I want them to say, ‘Who cares if it’s a job site in Ohio or Colorado?’ I want them not to be afraid to go out there and see the job site.”

Watching a dismantled plant come out of a job site, understanding the jobs of the truckers and stevedores: that’s when you begin to understand why things work the way they do, she said.
— JANET NODAR

Jeannine Carnes
President
Senrac Transportation Services

Jeannine Carnes calls her introduction into the shipping industry a “fluke,” one that launched a career leading to ownership of her own company. Just 19 years old, Carnes moved to Texas from Florida in 1982 looking for a job, any job. Her former sister-in-law helped her land a receiving clerk position at Hudson’s Crating. She climbed the ranks from there.

Today, Carnes is founder and president of Senrac Transportation Services, an international freight forwarder that commands top dollar for its services. “I have many clients tell me that my prices are higher than others, but my paperwork’s always right when their product’s released or going to the pier,” she said. “We get all of our ducks in a row before they send the truck in.”

Because the company is small — just Carnes and an assistant — keeping such a high level of customer service rests largely on her shoulders. “There is nothing that I am not involved with as far as the day to day operations are concerned,” she said. On any given day, she does bookings, arranges deliveries, tracks shipment dates, obtains documents, and sends out invoices in addition to interacting with customers.

Senrac specializes in shipping oversized equipment such as bulldozers and mobile drilling rigs to ports in North and South America, Australia, Europe, Asia and Africa. “The majority of my business is heavy machinery, and that, of course, is predominantly controlled by men,” she says. “To break into that has been an accomplishment.”

She attributes her ability to excel in a male-dominated industry to the same factors that keep customers returning again and again: attention to detail, hard work and industry knowledge. Carnes accumulated the latter from jobs that included clerking, coordinating traffic and managing import/export accounts.

“For some of us, it’s in our blood,” she says of the demanding, hectic environment of shipping freight. “You either love it or you hate it. I left once and was bored to tears. I am used to a fast pace, every phone call being different. After 28 years in the business, there’s always something new to learn.”

— JEANETTE VALENTINE

Jamilette De La Paz
Vice president of liner services
BBC Chartering

Jamilette De La Paz oversees BBC Chartering’s Houston-based breakbulk liner services to the east and west coasts of South America. Each service deploys three vessels and calls at Houston twice monthly.

Her job calls for close coordination with the sales team and BBC’s global business department, she said. She negotiates with customers, including setting prices, and has to develop a business relationship built on trust. It requires long hours: “You never have a 100 percent day off, per se. You are always on call.”

De La Paz came from a freight forwarding background and started in operations at BBC nine years ago, handling documents, working with the technical department, making sure port captains were in place, coordinating discharges with agents.

She was promoted to operations manager, overseeing six people, and then moved to the pricing side when she started working on BBC’s first liner service — previously, it had been a tramp operation only. “I started from the bottom up, learning the terminology. I had worked very little in projects.” BBC, she said, offered her opportunities to learn and the tools to do so.

De La Paz was part of the team that built the initial Gulf-South America liner service. One challenge was simply becoming known as a liner carrier. Because BBC has a large global fleet, they have the option of pulling in vessels to handle cargo with unusual needs or to handle a special sailing. “Many times we had to switch out because of last minute cargo coming in. Many delays happened from the cargo side. Or cancellations. We are still faced with those challenges,” she said.

However, the line matured quickly; within 60 days they went from one to two calls a month.

De La Paz had a few years of college and then began working in the freight forwarding industry. Like others, she believes that school cannot be a substitute for learning on the job in the maritime trade. “You will never know it all. Every day you are faced with a different challenge. You learn something new every day.”

— JANET NODAR

Diana Hamm
Traffic manager
Foster Wheeler USA Corp.

As traffic and logistics manager for engineering, procurement and construction company Foster Wheeler, Diana Hamm coordinates all domestic and international shipments. It’s demanding, but not as much so as the freight forwarding world she spent 30 years in before coming to FW, Hamm said.

Now, she has the advantage of a long lead time to prepare for jobs. Freight forwarders often don’t get handed a project until it’s a “drop-dead emergency. That is not as prevalent in the EPC world. We have months and months to figure things out; design, engineering, sourcing and moving. I have a lot of time to research. I do like this side of the fence,” she said.

Her peers at Foster Wheeler don’t always understand what it takes for forwarders to do the best job: “they don’t have the same understanding or compassion I have for my fellow freight forwarders. They remind me I am no longer a freight forwarder. I remind them: garbage in, garbage out.”

Hamm originally started working for her father, Wayne Rickey, who owned a Houston-based trucking company. After she graduated from high school, she started at a freight forwarder’s office as a receptionist. After making it through the tough market of the ’80s, Hamm worked in project and breakbulk freight forwarding from the early ’90s, originally for Saga Transport and then for Transoceanic (later Agility).

Does she regret not going to college? “I think an education is beneficial, but I am not sure it is mandatory in our industry. If you have confidence to work and learn and have the personality, I think you will excel on your own.” However, the grueling hours can be tough on make family, said Hamm, who has four children. It took an understanding spouse to make it work.

The shipping industry had its gender-related challenges, but it was easier there than in the overwhelmingly male EPC industry, she said. “It’s been a challenge, having to prove myself to this company. They don’t know me. But once you’ve earned your stripes, you are good to go.”

— JANET NODAR

Kathryne Lieser
International sales
TransGroup Worldwide Logistics

Growing up in New Jersey, Kathryne Lieser reigned as the neighborhood trouble-shooter, the go-to kid for fixing what was broken. “Whenever my friends had problems with their bicycles, they would always come over to my house,” she said. “And I always had all of the tools. We’d flip the bike over, change a flat within minutes, fix a chain, straighten out handlebars.”

As a member of TransGroup Worldwide Logistics’ sales team, Lieser has taken her mastery of problem solving to the international stage. Backed by a marketing degree from Seton Hall University, a two-year stint in the Navy and 15 years in maritime shipping, Lieser revels in using her knowledge, business contacts and TransGroup’s more than 300 agents to serve customers around the world.

For example, she recently coordinated the shipping of a 40-foot cargo container from Durban, South Africa to Xiagong, China. “My customer was here in Texas, and she didn’t know how to handle it. Because of my contacts worldwide, I was able to send an e-mail … and get that huge piece of freight shipped from a foreign port and delivered to a foreign port,” Lieser said. “(It happened) because of the people I know on both sides.”

As much as she enjoys her day job, Lieser receives even greater satisfaction from transferring her knowledge to others. Tuesday nights find her lecturing in a logistics class at the University of Houston.

“I’m teaching the future of my industry,” Lieser said. “I have the opportunity to share the information and knowledge that I’ve learned and earned the hard way during the last 15 years. I can share this information with 30 students all at one time.”

“While I was coming up in this industry, learning anything was like pulling teeth,” she said. “Now, I’m taking my experience and expertise and sharing it with my students. And that’s what’s the most rewarding. That’s what I’ve loved the most about being in this industry.”

— JEANETTE VALENTINE

Reina Olson
Houston sales manager
Intermarine

Reina Olson joined Intermarine, one of the largest project cargo transporters in the U.S., a year after it was founded in 1991. She was hired as the first sales representative for the Houston territory.

“We didn’t even have regular services back then,” Olson said. “We were just running ships here and there. We always thought we were going to just stay this little company … and it’s grown tremendously since I’ve been here. And I’ve been part of that. That’s been a gratifying experience.”

Intermarine provides breakbulk and container services, custom voyages and transport of heavy-lift and boxhold vessels for routes to South America and Intra-Asia, which includes the Far and Middle East. The company earned revenues of $287 million in 2007, a 40 percent increase from $194 million the previous year.

“(Things) are good for the breakbulk market,” said Olson, who’s now a sales manager supervising a team of five. “It’s not to say that it’s going to be good forever with the crunch in the credit situation. That, of course, may affect certain things.

(But) it doesn’t show you the whole picture. Projects are going on all over the world. They need these kinds equipment to build these projects, their oil refineries and build their oil fields and drill rigs … these things go on regardless of what the regular or commercial trade may do.”

She said that because business is strong, it’s a good time to enter the industry. Women are growing in number in the field and reaching higher positions, including those that came into it straight from high school.

“The industry itself is very supportive of women in these positions,” Olson said. “(People) don’t distinguish between men and women as far as the job that they can do. They really look at the merit of your work. It’s all knowledge-based, especially in sales. It’s who you know, and who you develop relationships with is a big factor.”

— JEANETTE VALENTINE

Fiona Stigter
Project traffic and logistics manager
Bechtel Corp.

Container ships and oil tankers never appealed to Fiona Stigter. She enjoys the distinctive challenges of project shipping: remote locations; often spectacularly heavy or awkward cargoes; difficult inland transport; strange local customs and cultures. She likes the satisfaction of knowing she and her team are able to get something innately hard to move to a location “everybody thinks you can’t ship anything to.”

Stigter has worked with international transportation construction projects for more than 16 years, handling massive engineering and construction projects in some of the most remote locations on the planet. Since 2004 Stigter has been with Bechtel Corp., one of the world’s largest engineering, construction, and project management companies.

Stigter manages a staff of six logistics specialists, various subcontractors and, currently, a logistics team in Africa, where she is overseeing a large liquefied natural gas project. Nonetheless, she describes her job simply: “What I do is make sure that all materials and equipment to build (a given) facility arrive at the job site in time. We ship (via) all different types of transportation: air freight, ocean freight, trucking. You name it, we use it.”

Stigter’s father was an agent for European heavy-lift carriers in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. From childhood she visited ships with him and her first goal was to work with him. She did not get to do that because her father died young, but she still remembers his stories about pioneering heavy-lifts, ship crane capacities and exotically remote locations.

Stigter went to maritime college in the Netherlands and then to work for a stevedore, but had always wanted to handle heavy-lift transport. When the opportunity arose she went to work for Mammoet Shipping in the Netherlands.

From there, a move to engineering, procurement, and construction companies such as Bechtel was the next logical step: “The work is broader than just heavy-lift and you see a lot of different facets (of the industry) than if you are just transporting heavy pieces.” Working on different sides of the table has been a valuable experience and has made her a tough negotiator, as some subcontractors and carriers have told her.

— JANET NODAR