INNOVATION March-April 2017

f ea t u r e s The gender gap needs to be addressed quickly. In 2017, the mining industry is staring down a talent pipeline decimated by a five-year downturn. Increasing the number of female professional engineers and geoscientists in mining will help alleviate the shortage. There has never been a more important time to create workplaces that truly are gender inclusive. Good for Business Although the issue of gender diversity is dismissed by some as political correctness, tokenism or quotas, the benefits of gender diversity are practical and affect organizations’ bottom lines. Companies with female representation on their boards and women in senior management positions perform better financially. According to a 2012 Credit Suisse Research Institute study of more than 3,000 companies worldwide, stocks at companies with at least one woman on the board of directors outperformed stocks at companies with all-male boards by 26 percent. Unfortunately, the number of women on boards and in senior management positions around the world remains low. “There are fewer big Australian companies run by women than by men named Peter,” noted Australia’s retiring Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick in 2015. Diverse workplaces are safer, too. A clear link has been documented between gender and safety in workplaces, and research has shown that gender plays a role in risky behaviour, injuries, and even fatalities. The benefits of gender diversity are numerous. In addition, a workforce that reflects the composition of the community draws from a deeper talent pool. Where are All the Women? “We have issues around inclusion that keep being brought up in the sector,” says Courtnay Hughes, manager of Human Resources Research at the Mining Industry Human Resources Council. “Our research indicates that both women and men perceive mining ‘workplace culture’ as a barrier that impacts women in the sector.”

Although blatant discrimination against women in the mining industry—such as Ontario’s former Mining Act , which prohibited women from working underground until 1978—has been largely eliminated, Hughes says subtle influences and unconscious biases remain. The Mining Industry Human Resources Council investigated these barriers in their 2016 Exploring Gender Inclusion report. The research shows that women may be unaware of the breadth of careers in mining, find inflexible workplaces and problematic workplace culture, don’t see or meet female role models and mentors, or have limited options for career advancement. Similar barriers exist for immigrants and Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The council defines a gender-inclusive workplace as “one where traditional definitions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ do not influence decision-making about people, and where subtle expectations and ‘micro-inequities’ in processes are questioned and resolved.” Workplace culture not only impacts who stays, but who is attracted to the sector in the first place. People won’t choose a workplace where they don’t see themselves as a good fit. At the university level, the number of female graduates in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is slowly increasing. In 2011, 39 percent of STEM university graduates aged 25 to 34 were female, although bias still favours biology and science subjects over engineering, computer science, and mathematics. If the numbers are improving at university, what happens next? “There is no use graduating young women into industry if there is not fertile ground for them to grow,” says Donna Howes, P.Eng., chair of APEGBC’s Women in Engineering and Geoscience Task Force in 2013/2014. The task force made a number of recommendations in the areas of outreach and recruitment to improve gender diversity in BC’s engineering and geoscience professions. The overwhelming message from investigations like these and years of research is that gender inclusion does not just happen.

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