By Jenna Goudreau, Forbes April 30, 2010
The devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has created a massive 100-mile-long slick that today reached the coast of Louisiana. It could be one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, and the leadership in charge of cleaning up BP’s mess is largely female.
Turn to any number of important instances--think about the "No one saw this coming" markets' collapse--and it seems that women are jumping in to mop up the mess. This catastrophe is no exception.
Meanwhile, mega-fuel company BP, responsible for the underwater oil leak, has a team of all-male top executive officers who now have to pay for the clean-up (hundreds of of millions of dollars), face their investors with stock losses of more than 8% (valued at $25 billion), as of Thursday, and somehow respond to the expected $1 billion in claims and costs to the insurance industry. That, and answer for the tragic man-made disaster to the citizens of the Gulf and the world.
President Obama announced that he will use every resource available to control the oil spill, and he has dispatched women leaders like U.S. Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano; Carol Browner, the assistant to the president for Energy and Climate Change; Dr. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson, who has organized aircraft in the area to gather information on air quality.
The spill is one of the largest ecological disasters to date and threatens the many families dependent on the fishing industry in the Gulf. It’s been reported that 5,000 barrels of oil are pouring into the water everyday, and nearly 6,000 National Guard troops have been deployed to reign in the damage. It will take skilled leadership to control the devastation, and the many women in charge seem up to the challenge.
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