BHP seeks to bring women to the table
BHP Billiton, the leading mining company, is taking diversity lessons from banks and law enforcement to achieve a gender-balanced workforce by 2025 and to promote women into top executive roles.
The miner has held talks with companies including Australia & New Zealand Banking Group on policies to boost female recruitment and retention, according to BHP chief of staff and head of geoscience Laura Tyler in an interview on Wednesday.
“Banking had also been seen as a boys’ club and the high street banks, the retail banking sector, has made a huge turnaround,” says Tyler, who was appointed in 2016 to BHP’s 10-strong executive team, one of three women to hold a top leadership post. “We are talking with them about how did they change things.”
Financial companies in the Bloomberg world index have an average of about 52% female staff, the highest among all industries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Materials producers including BHP and competitor Rio Tinto Group, have the lowest share at 19%, the data show.
BHP, which in October announced its target for gender balance, sees a clear commercial case for changing its workforce, according to Tyler. “The sites that are most diverse, and where people say they are most able to speak up and feel inclusive, are delivering our strongest results and our better safety results.”
Better performance by BHP’s workplaces with greater diversity reflects a broader trend. Among more than 4,000 companies in the Bloomberg world index that disclose the gender of board members or executives, the best-performing stocks over three years are those with the highest percentage of female executives. Companies with a larger share of female executives had the lowest price fluctuation and smallest disparity between earnings and analysts’ forecasts.
BHP’s 10 operations with the highest proportion of female staff performed at least 15% better than the producer’s averages on metrics including productivity, safety and meeting production forecasts, CEO Andrew Mackenzie said in a memo to staff in October.
ANZ, Australia’s thirdbiggest bank, has a woman on every interview panel and on each candidate short list, head of private wealth Alexis George said on Wednesday at a Bloomberg Voices event in Sydney. The bank focused on ensuring female employees got more honest appraisals to help them develop, she said.
BHP has also discussed recruitment and practices with Victoria Police; catering company Sodexo; and Telstra Corporation, Australia’s biggest telecommunications provider.
Tyler says that BHP, where women account for less than a quarter of senior managers, is seeking to prepare a larger pipeline of female staff with the skills and experience necessary to be top executives.
BHP is seeing some progress in areas including its finance and legal teams, according to Tyler. For example, when a successor for chief financial officer Peter Beaven is needed, “there’s a fairly good chance that there are going to be really smart women banging at that door, just as there will be really smart men who’ve always been there banging at that door”, she says.
To achieve gender balance among about 26,827 direct employees, BHP will need to overturn meagre recent progress in the mining sector. The proportion of women employed by mining companies rose to an average of 15.7% in most recent full-year reporting from 14.7% five years earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Women accounted for 17.6% of Melbourne-based BHP’s employees in the 12 months to June 30 2016, according the latest annual report. That compares with 17% in 2012.
The adoption of technologies that allow mining operations to be controlled or monitored remotely from city offices is opening up opportunities to add more female staff. Among 200 workers at BHP’s Brisbane coal control centre, a majority are female and were drawn from previous careers including as nurses, emergency callcentre operators and military logistics experts.