I’m digging BHP’s stand over affirmative action
BHP Billiton (BHPB) last week announced a goal of 50 per cent females in its workforce by 2025. Female representation in 2016 is 17.6 per cent.
That means for every female working at BHPB in any capacity across the business — including headquarters and marketing offices, not just mine sites — there are currently around four males. The public declaration at the annual general meeting was to change that to a 1:1 ratio within nine years.
That’s a huge ambition and, I believe, a worthy and achievable one. But I would say that, of course. Not least because I’m female, but also because I’m reasonably familiar with the organisation, the industry and sustainability targets, which include gender balance in the workforce.
As I cheer from the sidelines for this courageous and logical step, others will scream and shout about affirmative action.
The often loud and sometimes bitter reaction is to the perceived threat to males about setting gender targets. Typically, the argument is along the lines of, “Aiming for an equal representation of women is to discriminate against men.”
Imagine being discriminated against on the basis of gender. Gee, that would be awful. Wouldn’t it?
Frivolous sarcasm aside, whatever one’s position, this big corporate’s big target is big news.
According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, just 2.6 per cent of the mining industry’s CEOs, 12 per cent of key management staff and 16 per cent of all workers are women, making it the most maledominated industry in Australia.
And yet, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and industry group UK Women in Mining, companies with gender diversity in their boards outperformed all-male mining company boards by 49 per cent on the basis of the ratio of a firm’s enterprise value to its proven mineral reserves. All-male boards showed 92 per cent more negative ratings on earnings per share.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg with the merit argument. Strangely, though, the BHPB announcement didn’t make the news in any significant way.
It didn’t make our local news at all. The day of the announcement carried headlines about the latest charges filed by prosecutors in the long-running Samarco case in Brazil and chairman Jac Nasser’s decision to step down after 10 years on the board.
One social media commenter claimed that the gender target story was “spin”. Now, I have spent a lot of my career in PR, so I take that sort of remark with exactly the negative connotation with which it is intended. Note to troll: if something is delivered as “spin” the intention is to gloss over a fact and package it as something else.
There is no glossing over the current gender imbalance — it’s what makes the target so startling.
But perhaps the implication, poorly articulated, was that it was a red herring. For the world’s biggest mining company to publicly aim for 50 per cent gender equality in less than 10 years is to ensure that they will see that aspirational goal writ large many times in the next decade.
A strange choice to run as a decoy story.
There will be refusal to accept this as good news by many and it will be ignored by others in the hope it will fade away. But this little black duck is inspired by the men and women leading BHP Billiton.
Let’s hope we see such humble acceptance of reality and authorisation of positive change by more leaders. Stephanie Asher is a professional consultant, writer and speaker. Twitter: @stephanieasher1