Efforts of breaking the glass ceiling to give women opportunities to achieve high level positions are being made by many industries. Is the mining sector passing the test?

Canada is one of the world’s main mining hubs, with top mining companies establishing their headquarters there, which makes it a good place to assess equality in the industry. The result is that Canada only has 15% of women in mining, as Akhil Dutta, a business consultant specialised in mines and metals, said at MM Steelclub’s Canadian Mining Virtual Conference, held on 26 June.

“It is not a small number, but it is a number which can easily be improved given the fact that this is a very progressive country”, he said.

Gordon Neal, president of New Pacific Metals Corporation, also talked at the event about the relevance of having women in boards. “I have personally been on one board where we brought a female in. It changed the tenor of the conversation, it changed the language. It changed how we conduct ourselves as males in the room”, he said.

Many times, pressure to work towards equality in board rooms comes from the public opinion. But, as Neal said, it can also emanate from shareholders:  “There are a lot of funds right now that, if you don’t have diversity in your C-suite or your board, they will not invest. I got a letter from a Canadian Pension Plan or CPP a couple of years ago threatening to pull their investment because we didn’t have a woman in the board and we changed that”.

Dutta believes that diversity is something that must be incentivised specially by universities: “When we talk about women in the industry, or we talk about special local communities in the industry, universities play a role as important as the government does… It has an important aspect if you look at the developments that had to happen to incentivise a girl or someone from a special community to take up a certain different skill, which in this case, is mining”.