It is lucky that Kelly Down’s father worked as a machine operator at Bell Bay Aluminium, because it meant that her transition from fashion student to fitter and turner at the smelter was less of a shock than it might have been.
“You work with your hands,” says Down, now 44, of the similarity between the two careers. “That’s about it.”
Since Down started as an apprentice 27 years ago, she has seen much change. Back then, she was one of only two female fitter and turner apprentices in Tasmania and one of her issues was that her male colleagues were overly chivalrous. “They just wanted to do everything for you,” she says.
However, there was also some resentment about a woman entering their space. One of the male apprentices was not backward in telling her that women did not belong. “He thought women should be barefoot and pregnant and chained to the kitchen,” she says. “It was what his father had taught him.”
Down, now a safety and training officer at Bell Bay Aluminium, made it her business to beat him at every task and assessment until he was forced to revise his view. He eventually learned to treat her like a colleague, rather than as a “girl”.
The resources industry is the most male-dominated sector in Australia, a fact the industry has taken steps to address in the past 10 years. But while some employers have taken massive strides in hiring and promoting women, the female proportion of the industry workforce still sits at about 16%.
Several industry groups aim to raise female participation to 25% by 2020. Earlier this month Down was celebrated at the 2016 Women in Resources National Awards, an initiative by the Minerals Council of Australia and the various Women in Mining state branches, when she won the Glencore outstanding Australian tradeswoman, operator or technician award.
The director of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Libby Lyons, says it would be unrealistic to expect parity in the numbers of women and men across the industry because of the difficulties of shift work and fly in-fly out arrangements.
And, given that it has taken three years to shift that participation by 2.6 percentage points to 16%, there is still a great deal of “heavy lifting” to be done to move to the industry goal of 25%.
“A lot of the roles, at the more junior level in particular, aren’t attractive to a lot of women. A lot of women don’t want to work on the tools and don’t want to work underground,” says Lyons, who has worked in corporate affairs for BHP Billiton, CITIC Pacific Mining Management and Alcoa.
However, employers in mining have shown a willingness to be progressive, with nearly 61% of them having a strategy on gender equality and 34.3% doing a pay gap analysis (compared with 19.1% across all sectors). Lyons says the industry also has better paid parental leave schemes – 11.9 weeks of primary carers’ leave on average.
Still only 2.6% of CEOs in the industry are women, who also only make up 12.3% of key management personnel. “So, they are doing very poorly in the leadership space,” she says.
The majority of women in the industry (77.4%) are in administrative and clerical positions, however at least one company (Newmont Mining at the WA Boddington goldmine) is actively recruiting female truck drivers, introducing a 9am to 2pm shift to fit in with family responsibilities. “They are easier on the hardware [trucks],” says Lyons.
Earlier this year BHP Billiton announced that women now held the majority of positions on its executive team at the Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine project in South Australia. This team has six women and five men reporting into the asset president, Jacqui McGill.
Similarly over at BHP Billiton’s Daunia coalmine in Queensland, quotas have ensured about a quarter of its workforce is female. Across the entire company, the proportion of female executives sits at 17%, up from 8% over the past five years.
Rio Tinto is also working at it: 43% of its graduate intake is female and the proportion of women in senior management is 18% (working towards a target of 20%).
At St Barbara Ltd, which operates goldmines in Western Australia and Papua New Guinea, the gender pay gap has been reduced from 43% in 2007 to 11.4% in June 2014 (compared with 17.6% for the industry).
Eliminating a pay gap requires employers to hire more women into senior and higher-paid positions, as well as making sure that women are not being paid less for doing the same jobs.
At Aurizon (a transport and logistics company servicing the resources industry), there is a target to get to 30% of women by 2019. This would require doubling its existing number of women and the company has introduced some groundbreaking employee benefits in order to get there.
Those benefits include “shared care” arrangements, whereby a partner (usually the father) can take 13 weeks of fully paid leave (or 26 weeks at half pay) in the first year of an infant’s life to allow the other partner to return to full-time work.
What is more, if a female (or prime carer) employee returns to work full-time in the first year and is supported by a partner who is on leave without pay from another employer, she will receive 150% of her pay for up to 26 weeks to cover the fact that her partnerisn’t being paid for that time.
These initiatives helped Aurizon to pick up the excellence in company programs and performance award at the 2016 Women in Resources National Awards. .
Former Aurizon chief executive Lance Hockridge was acknowledged as the driving force behind the company’s diversity agenda but it seems incoming CEO – and former Rio Tinto Iron Ore CEO – Andrew Harding looks set to continue the work.
While a spokesman for the company said it was too early to speculate on the place of diversity in Harding’s priorities in his new role, he is on record supporting inclusiveness.
“Responsibility for workplace flexibility, diversity and inclusiveness of an organisation is not the responsibility of the human resources manager,” Harding has said. “It’s the responsibility of the leader. Change starts at the top.”
