Strength in Numbers
Building gender diversity in mining
By Sarah Gauen, manager, Diversity Initiatives and Courtnay Hughes, manager, Manager of HR Research, for Mining Industry Human Resources Council (MiHR)
MiHR’s latest national labour market report details that in 2016 women accounted for 17 per cent of the Canadian mining workforce - only a slight increase from the 14 per cent noted over 10 years ago and substantially below the overall Canadian workforce at 48 per cent. We can see things are changing, but when we look at the overall representation the impacts are fairly minimal. This slow pace of change isn’t consistent across all jobs, in fact the mining industry faces broad underrepresentation of women layered over specific occupational gaps. When we compare the representation of women in occupational categories in mining, to the representation in all industries - we see that gender gaps are prevalent across occupational categories in the sector. Even in occupations that traditionally have low female representation, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)-related professions; the mining industry has not attracted a representative proportion of women into the sector. The underrepresentation of women has been causing increasing levels of alarm in and out of the sector - a developing appetite for addressing gender equity in mining has resulted in an upswing of activity, research, conference panels and initiatives joining the chorus of those working on the issues at hand. Recently, MiHR published a national study on gender in mining, Strengthening Mining’s Talent Alloy: Exploring Gender Inclusion, which looked at the experiences of women and men in mining and provides insights on the challenges and solutions that are available to foster greater inclusion. Key findings include:
60 Mining North of 60 | 2017
Mining workplaces are perceived and experienced differently by men and women: In general, the respondents to this study indicated that their mining workplaces were characterized as respectful. However, women had less positive experiences than men were more likely to report seeing put-downs, harassment and a lack of team atmosphere. Work-life integration is a challenge for everyone: The ability to integrate work with personal and family demands continues to be a challenge for women – particularly in remote locations and FIFO assignments. However, there is a growing recognition that these issues are not “women’s issues” as men are taking larger family responsibilities outside of work and millennials have greater expectations around flexibility. Workplace culture perceptions impact recruitment and retention: The women in this research were more likely than men to expect to leave the sector within the next five years. Not surprisingly, survey respondents who were less comfortable in their current mining workplace were more likely to leave the sector within the next five years. Accessing mining networks remains a barrier to greater workforce diversity: Finding out about job openings and career opportunities in mining is a continued challenge. Having a personal network appears to be critically important – yet women highlighted that it is difficult for them access these networks. Workplace harassment is harming mining workers: Overall, the survey results indicated that in many workplaces, harassment incidents are infrequent – more than half of the survey respon-