International women's week: Mathilde gets surprised every day
We highlight International
women’s day 8 March all week by presenting female professionals working
in some of Vattenfall’s markets and business areas.
Mathilde Lindhardt
Damsgaard is a Program Director for the construction of Vattenfall’s
most recent offshore wind farms in Denmark, Vesterhav North and South.
“I’ve been in the
offshore wind business since 2006, and I started with Vattenfall three
years ago. As the Program Director I am in charge of Vesterhav North and
South, two wind farms that we are now constructing in the North Sea off
the Danish west coast. In an offshore project organisation there are so
many functions and layers, technical, commercial and more, and my main
task is to give the people in the team the best conditions to succeed in
their jobs, to get management support when needed and to remove any obstacles
that turn up. This means that I spend most of my days talking to a lot
of people, and frankly doing quite a lot of presentations.
There are some one
hundred people in the project team – including the package managers
who work with the specific parts of the construction project and who have
the detailed knowledge around the different components, technologies and
processes - and everything I don’t know anything about. With all subcontractors
we are about 1200 people involved.
I really like working
and interacting with all the passionate and highly competent people. There
is also a lot of flexibility where I have room to both influence, impact
and learn something almost every day, and I really like that opportunity.
The curiosity of what the next day brings is what gets me out of bed in
the morning! I still get surprises every day and this is what I like.
I am a civil engineer,
and my niche is construction in water. I studied hydro dynamics, waves
and that sort of things. My first job was for a land-based construction
company, but I soon found that I missed the complexity that water brings
into the equation. At the time, in the early 2000s, the offshore wind industry
was very young, and I thought: that sounds fairly complicated! So I went
for it. I really liked the entrepreneurial spirit, and to be part of an
entirely new field. Over the years the business has developed, and challenges
have changed. Today it’s more about optimising the projects and
to get financial feasibility without subsidies.
I have never before
worked in a company where the importance of diversity and inclusion in
the organisation was so explicitly vocalised. I feel that Vattenfall
is a very welcoming organisation that tries to make room for people. Our
wind organisation is very diverse in many ways I would say, even if there
are still meetings where I am the only woman.
Is there a need for
the International Women’s Day? I would say yes. In our corner of
the world in Scandinavia we are doing all right in many ways, in other
parts of the world it’s different. But above all I think it’s important
to be able to discuss these issues, not only gender, but age, ethnicity
etc., without getting into a polarised situation. If we can’t discuss
and listen to each other, we will not be able learn anything.”