Gender Partnership Can Change Workplaces, Industries, and the World. Just Ask Mike Wirth of Chevron. (Video)

The CEO of Chevron talks about MARC programming and impact.

Men play an essential role in improving workplaces and opportunities for people of all genders, as Chevron CEO Mike Wirth knows firsthand. A longtime supporter of Catalyst’s MARC (Men Advocating Real Change) initiative, which engages men in creating positive culture change and gender equity at all levels of workplaces and organizations, Wirth has been a key leader in advancing gender partnership. At the 2024 Catalyst Awards, Wirth sat down with Catalyst’s outgoing President and CEO Lorraine Hariton to chat about gender partnership and MARC by Catalyst, which Chevron committed significant funding to under Wirth’s leadership.

As a child, adolescent, and teen, Wirth was lucky to have exposure to powerful women , and as time went on, he realized he could proactively create the circumstances in which inspiring women would always be in his personal orbit. “I always wanted to be in the on the project teams with some of the women students because they were the best students that would give you the best grade,” he said. “When I started at Chevron, my first three supervisors were women and they were still, to this day, three of the very best bosses that I’ve ever had, and relatively early on.”

Those early experiences showed him the value of women’s perspectives, ideas, and experiences that some of his colleagues weren’t getting. “As my career progressed, I realized I had a series of unusual experiences…. I was at a meeting with much of our senior women executives, and I was the only man in the room. And after we went around for introductions and it was my opportunity to speak, my palms were sweaty, I had butterflies, and I realized what everybody in that room had felt many times being the only one.”

That revelation was a pivotal learning moment for Wirth, and it set him on the course that would eventually change the minds and lives of a lot of people at Chevron. Wirth knew that the othering experience women frequently have at work was antithetical to his values and that for things to change, the other men at Chevron would have to learn about what he had learned.

Enter MARC. “We created MARC’s discussion groups, and initially it was to enroll men,” Wirth said. “This is our company. We need to understand more and we need to engage more. And so, this began as single gender discussion groups to begin to explore some of these concepts. And very quickly and very naturally, they evolved to say, ‘We need women here to tell us, what do they really experience, what do they really feel?’”

Today, MARC programming at Chevron is flourishing, with over 5,000 employees participating across all six continents of operations. And women make up over 30% over senior executives and half of the board.

So, what’s next? Last year, Catalyst unveiled the Frontline Employees Initiative, the importance of which was not lost on Wirth. “Without a front line,” he said, “we don’t have a bottom line.” To that end, Chevron is supporting Catalyst’s work to bring MARC to the front line. Wirth said, “Most of the things I described earlier have gone on with office-based workers.” In frontline work, “You don’t have the same flexibility or the same capability, but we’ve got to have the same conversations.”

And Chevron has already hit the ground running. “We’ve got a pilot now in North America with onshore facilities, offshore facilities, refineries, chemical plants…. We’re trying to bring some of these tools into that work environment, see how they work, get feedback from our people, and find a way to reach that part of our workforce where we still do have an opportunity to increase both representation and I also think inclusion,” Wirth said.

The work on gender partnership and inclusion at work is ongoing for Wirth and for Chevron. The journey continues. “Our industry faces one of the biggest challenges mankind has ever faced, right? How do we go through an energy transition to get to a lower carbon economy, to deal with the challenges of climate change? I need people from every country, every background, every racial and ethnic group, every way of thinking. And I need them to be able to bring their whole selves to work so we can solve these big challenges. I can’t afford to not have a workforce that represents all of the people and all of the ideas, all of the creativity, all the passion. It’s really so core to our purpose.”

MARC by Catalyst has grown into a robust suite of programs, including MARC Executive Dialogue for C-suite leaders and a thriving community of alumni of MARC programs.

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