The outgoing CEO, Steve Chazen, was a financial guy who was apparently picked to guide the company down from the 2010 production peak, selling off properties and generally lowering capital expenditures. He was only CEO for four years; and Oxy just did a downsizing last month, lots of "old guys" thrown over the side.
Guess that was Chazen's last chore: Take out the "trash". Modern management force-ranks every single employee, and as you might imagine, there are several factors that might slide an otherwise productive employee toward the door. Right now maleness and age seem to be a debilitating pair of characteristics to drag uphill every day. The oil industry has always tried to keep its workforce an age pyramid ..... like the rest of industry. The practice forces co-workers to compete with one another in a perpetual game of "musical chairs" until they lose and get fired.
Amoco, which in the "good old days" 40 years ago preferred to hire Nazi rocket scientists (emphasis on "Nazi"), discriminated vigorously against male employees during nine rounds of layoffs and "rightsizing" from 1989 to 1998. The women finally got caught in the 1998 squeeze, at which time Amoco prophylactically surfaced a VP-HR to explain to the New Orleans papers why there was such a disproportionate number of women and foreigners in the latest round of dismissals. In the course of the interview the company admitted to their anti-masculine, anti-native, anti-Caucasian bias during the previous nine years.
The Amoco change in policy was precipitated by a visit from three Power Feminists who explained to Amoco executives that henceforward, with the Democrats returning to national office soon, that if Amoco wanted no trouble with its federal leases offshore, that they'd better start sculpting their workforce to "look like America" (i.e. downtown, big-city, minoritarian America), or else there might be ..... trouble.
My guess is that these women knew Hillary was coming, and they were "in early", trading on her feminazism.
Policies like this work for the Democrats two ways: They pump up the number of left-leaning mush-heads in the company at the bottom of the pyramid, teach them that "fairness" got them their jobs, and deprive Republican candidates of cash donations from employed (now disemployed) conservatives. What could go wrong with a strategy of throwing every white male in America into the unemployment line?
Actually, she spent just a few years in California.
Most time was spent in West Texas. That his why they company directed its attention that way.
She is a great manager and will do well.
I know, I was there.