Gilvan Barreto for The New York Times
Maria das Graças Foster, Petrobras chief, with a portrait of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, nearby.
By SIMON ROMERO
THE global oil industry has long been a male-dominated bastion, represented in the popular imagination by real gulf sheiks and fictional swaggerers like J. R. Ewing in “Dallas.” But an exception to this rule has emerged in Brazil, Latin America’s rising oil power, where women now occupy the most powerful positions in the nation’s booming energy industry.
In a matter of weeks this year, Maria das Graças Foster, a longtime chemical engineer, rose to the top job at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, and Magda Chambriard was nominated to lead the National Petroleum Agency, which regulates Brazil’s oil sector.
Placing women in such commanding positions is a priority of President Dilma Rousseff, the first woman to lead Brazil. Ms. Rousseff, who visited the United States this week, is a former energy minister who headed Petrobras’s board for seven years during the administration of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“She knows the industry very well, and can be extremely demanding,” Ms. Foster said in an interview here of Ms. Rousseff, an economist about whom tales of browbeating of subordinates are legend, giving Brazilian comedians ample material for skits. “When she calls, I need to have the answer on the tip of my tongue,” Ms. Foster said.
There aren’t many examples of women rising high in the energy industry. Within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Diezani Alison-Madueke, the oil minister of Nigeria, is a woman. In the United States, Lynn Elsenhans was Sunoco’s chief executive for four years before stepping down this year. The chief executive of Pertamina, Malaysia’s oil company, and the head of Schlumberger Asia, a branch of the oil-field services company, are also women.
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