WOMEN IN WIND

Women serving prominent roles in Maine’s emerging wind energy industry

Jon Marcus, July 4, 2014 (Bangor Daily News)

“…Maine leads New England in the amount of power it generates from wind, but substantial obstacles remain. The high cost and environmental impact of running transmission lines to connect far-flung wind farms to the electrical grid is one of them…Another is a thicket of regulation that contributes to the fact that only one in five projects in the Northeast actually ever gets built…[Katherine Joyce, an attorney at Bernstein Shur in Portland who specializes in the complex permitting process needed to harness wind for power, is] one of a surprising number of women in Maine who are prominent in the fast-growing industry…[W]omen hold only 12 percent of jobs in the business nationwide…[I]n spite of alternative energy’s meteoric growth, far fewer women than men enter the occupations that principally fuel it. Barely 14 percent of engineers and architects are women, and women make up only 2 percent of electricians…[and] colleges and universities continue to graduate four times more male than female engineers…But the fact that wind energy is still a comparatively new industry means there are also fewer traditional barriers for those women who want to move in and move up…” click here for more

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