BP Houston Adds Gender Reassignment Surgery To Benefits List

HOUSTON, TX — The oil-industry employment market is extremely competitive, and companies seeking to recruit and retain workers have to offer more than merely high salaries. Benefits are the name of the game, and one giant in the field just announced a slew of new perks designed to keep and attract the best and the brightest, including coverage for gender reassignment surgery.

Karl Dalal, the company's director of benefits, said the additions at the company's Energy Corridor campus came organically, the result of executives noticing that the makeup of BP's workforce had changed: It had grown younger and more diverse, and was asking for different sorts of benefits and programs, Dalal told the Houston Chronicle.

In addition, BP's benefits department added coverage for autism therapy for children of employees; increased maternal leave to 10 weeks from six, and gave fathers two weeks of paternal leave; and now offers four weeks off for adoption of surrogacy.

"It has everything to do with the global nature of their workforce," Chad Hesters, the managing director of executive search firm Korn Ferry's Houston office, told the Chronicle. "In Western Europe, a lot of these benefits already exist."

Dalal said that while the new benefits and expanded coverages are expensive, they prevent the loss of talent, adding that too many workers are already leaving the oil industry for the financial and tech areas.

Read the complete Chronicle story here.

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— Image: BP