Women forging a path into mining sector
Industry trails all other sectors on rates of female participation
Eira Thomas has discovered diamonds in the far north, co-founded mining companies and sat on a dozen boards — including Canada’s most valuable energy company.
So the 49-year-old was a little taken aback when an investor recently suggested she needed to hire an engineer as chief operating officer to back her up in the executive suite. She was, after all, only a geologist. “I’m 30 years in this business,” said Thomas, who took over as chief executive officer of Vancouver-based Lucara Diamond Corp. in February. “I’ve been involved in multiple projects that have gone on to become mines. I sit on the board of Suncor. And I just wonder if a male, newly appointed CEO with the same credentials would have faced the same commentary.”
Therein lies one of the biggest hurdles to getting more women into top jobs in mining: the conviction that leaders need to start out building mines, typically in remote locations, to run them.
Drawing women from legal, sustain- ability or finance departments while finding flexible ways to get them operational experience will be key to attracting the talent the industry needs to thrive, mining leaders such as Thomas say.
The materials industry, which includes miners, trails all other sectors in the Bloomberg World Index on rates of female participation, in both management and the broader workforce. Women head only one in 20 global miners, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from companies that supply a gender breakdown.
MINING continued on B3
Thomas cut her teeth mining, spending childhood summers exploring the north with her prospector father. The thought of working months at a time in “fly-in, fly-out” camps didn’t faze her.
“Eira’s different because she likes to prospect, and she’s been in the bush and she likes it,” said Lukas Lundin, the commodities titan who co-founded Lucara Diamonds with Thomas and Catherine McLeod-Seltzer in 2007.
Female geologists argue it’s not the digging, it’s the need to live for weeks, or even months in the bush, especially during child-rearing years, that can be a problem. But there are other ways to get to the top.
Barrick Gold’s Catherine Raw spent more than a decade as a portfolio manager at BlackRock International Ltd. before becoming an executive at the world’s largest gold producer. Having studied geophysics at Cambridge and mining finance at Imperial College London, the 36-year-old chief financial officer of the firm enjoyed exploration but said a life in London held more appeal.
As miners are increasingly asked to demonstrate the benefits they bring to society, Raw and Thomas say diverse backgrounds are key. Management teams need to be politically, environmentally, socially and financially adept, as well as strong on the technical front, Raw says. Thomas says more women will help the sector innovate and become more transparent — and that will also help attract the millennials who will be their next workforce.
Raw was pregnant in 2015 when executive chairperson John Thornton asked her to join Toronto-based Barrick. She suggested they talk in a year. He wasn’t fazed and helped her make it work. She joined the miner two months before her daughter was born but worked from London.
After the birth she took three months’ leave and worked from home for another four. She joined her colleagues at the Canadian headquarters in January 2016; three months later, she became CFO.
Companies are finding creative ways to boost their female ranks. BHP Billiton Ltd., which is aiming for a gender-balanced workforce by 2025, has sought to poach female employees from other careers, including nurses, emergency call centre operators and military logistics experts. Billionaire Gina Rinehart has targeted women’s sports teams for recruits for Roy Hill Holdings Pty’s iron ore mine in Western Australia.
Targets are also becoming more common; Toronto-based nickel miner Sherritt International Corp. is part of a voluntary initiative that calls for Canadian companies to boost female executives to 30 per cent by 2022. Currently only one of its eight senior executives is female, and two of eight board members.
Keeping women in the pipeline is also important. When Sherritt began gathering data on its female workforce, it discovered it was hiring women at a faster rate than its 15-per-cent average suggested — but losing them even more quickly, said CEO David Pathe, 49. The company is looking for ways to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done at remote locations and rethinking how much mine experience executives really need “because there just aren’t a lot of women with 20 years of operational experience.”
Finding qualified women for board positions is much easier, Pathe said, a claim born out by the data. Women directors at mining companies in the Bloomberg World Index has risen to 13 per cent from 5 per cent in the past five years.
While quotas would speed things up at the executive level, they make all three women uncomfortable. Even a whiff of “tokenism” risks undermining top women, Raw says, while Gaines says leadership positions must be filled on merit.
“If I had thought for one moment, when I showed up for my first Suncor board meeting, that I was a box-ticking exercise, I think it would have killed my ability to participate effectively,” Thomas said. “It was intimidating enough as it was.”