Emma Pane - Operations and Maintenance Manager, ARV Falls Creek

This International Women’s Day, we celebrate some of ARV’s women who are thriving in areas that have traditionally been considered ‘men’s’ roles.

Engineer Emma Pane has only been with ARV for a couple of weeks, but she’s already relishing the challenges that lie in her new role of Operations and Maintenance Manager at Falls Creek.

“It already feels like it’s going to be two separate jobs – winter and summer. In summer we work on getting projects underway, like asphalting carparks, performing maintenance on the resort’s assets, and also working on the mountain bike trails. In winter it’s going to change over to night shifts and snow clearing and grooming.”

This is Emma’s preferred work situation – variety and the opportunity to solve problems, and her early career in the male-dominated construction industry was a good way to learn how to operate in tough environments.

“I was accepted into the Boral graduate program straight out of university, and ran a quarry for three and a half years – the second busiest quarry that Boral owned. It was really full-on – 24 hours a day, six days a week.”

She then went on to work in road construction with Boral Steel, working on major projects like the North East Link, another high pressure, male dominated environment. Boral had a mentoring program, pairing younger engineers with more experienced engineers in the company and fortunately for Emma she was paired with the only other female engineer.

“I was really lucky – she was really lovely, and she was actually my reference for this role. Boral was also a key supporter of the WOMENG (Advancing Women in Infrastructure Engineering) program, which provided support and networking, as well as a mentoring program, so it was nice to be involved with that too.”

Emma is a firm supporter of women giving other women a hand up.

“I think it creates that environment where you want to give back and help the next generation coming through. I worked with a female graduate engineer at Boral and we still talk every week.”

She also believes that men supporting women in the workplace and speaking up about poor behaviour creates better workplaces for everyone.

“It’s about everyone having their colleagues’ backs, especially for people new in a role or new to an industry.”