Cathy Fitzgerald has always been aware that women are a minority in the mining world, especially in management.
“Moving up in my career, and now being a vice-president and maybe one day a CEO, standing in a room with 200 men and five women, you’re acutely aware of the imbalance in gender at the top of the mining industry,” said Fitzgerald, who is VP, exploration and resource development with Apollo Silver (TSXV: APGO; US-OTC: APGOF), in an interview late last year.
But reading a recent report from Toronto-based executive talent management firm Bedford Resources that put numbers to the imbalance, still left Fitzgerald feeling disappointed.
The Bedford Group Mining Industry Compensation Report 2022, released in November, found that the number of women in senior management roles and on boards in the mining sector actually declined in 2021 compared with the previous year. The findings were based on data from 322 mining companies listed on the TSX, TSXV, ASX, NASDAQ and NYSE.
Cathy Fitzgerald
A study released Oct. 13 last year by business law firm Osler showed some improvement for 2022, with the proportion of female directors on mining boards rising to 22%. That still lags behind the 25% level for TSX-listed companies as a whole and 36% at S&P/TSX 60 firms, said the 2022 Diversity Disclosure Practices report.
Frank Galati, Managing Partner at Bedford, questions if the 1.4% drop in female representation on boards in 2021 marks a real decline, noting that it could reflect a change in the composition of companies analyzed.
“But it’s not moving,” he said. “Why isn’t it 50% if women represent half of the population? My answer is that it’s getting there.”
“The problem…is a lot of young people aren’t entering the mining space. Females in particular aren’t entering it. So there are not a lot of [female] executives to pull from either,” he said.
He also points out that in 2008 when Bedford published its first compensation report, women only represented 9% to 11% of board and management positions.
Bedford’s findings were of little surprise to Heather Gamble, founder and CEO of the Artemis Project, a social enterprise that promotes change in mining and entrepreneurship for women. She said she sees few actions being taken in the industry to advance female representation.
“There’s a lot of positioning, ‘Yeah this is important.’ …[But] I don’t see a talent pipeline being built and developed, I don’t see budgets being allocated to really do the work that needs to be done to attract and retain the women,” she said.
She contrasts the mining world today with her own early career experience in technology sales at AT&T, where she gradually climbed the corporate ladder.
“There were many women there. It showed me there’s a path. There was a way and a will. There were opportunities and role models and real political will. I don’t hear of many progressive programs in mining,” she said.
Female executives
Not surprisingly, women are also largely absent from executive roles. Of the 325 CEO roles analyzed in the Bedford report, only 12 were held by women, or 3.7%, down from 8% in 2020. Among named executive officers, 14% were women in 2021, down from 18% in 2020.
For 2022, Osler showed the level of women executive officers rose to 17%, but it was still below the TSX-listed average of 20%, based on 582 companies surveyed.
Chief financial officer was the most common role filled by women in the industry, with 55 CFOs identifying as women, according to the 2022 Bedford report. Among legal representatives, 16 were women; for COOs, there were only four women; VP operations, just three; and VP exploration, one.
“There remains significant gender diversity work to be done in the mining industry,” the report noted.
Slow, halting change
Galati said that when he “puts on his recruiter hat,” he sees interest rising fast for greater diversity in mining.
“As an executive search firm last year we received over 30 requests to help boards diversify. There’s a move afoot to replace board members retiring with women. In past years, it would’ve been less than five board role [assignments] and probably out of those five one would be a request for diversity,” he said.
But for Gamble, the pace of change is moving too slowly. Change should be transformational rather than incremental, she says. A partial step forward, she said, is the 30% Club, an initiative of boosting female representation at board and c-suite levels to 30%.
Heather Gamble
According to Club data for Canada, representation of women on boards of TSX-Composite listed companies (including mining firms) rose from 17% in 2015 to 33.1% in 2022. C-suite representation in TSX listed firms climbed more slowly, from 16% in 2015 to 22.1% in 2022.
Among the major Canadian miners who are Club members, the boards of Barrick Gold (TSX: ABX; NYSE: GOLD, Nutrien (TSX: NTR), and Kinross Gold (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) all comprise 30% women. Senior management ranges from 18.75% (for Barrick) to 30% (for Kinross), according to data on their websites.
“My question is: why 30%? Why aren’t we going for 50%? It seems we’re setting targets for not equal representation to begin with,” she said.
Gamble envisions change through companies launching affirmative action programs and committing to reach 50% female representation.
She also said male leaders need to take the initiative if they’re serious about diversity.
“I participated in hundreds of events about participation of women in mining and often the audiences are 85% women talking about it,” she said. “We need the leaders to have the political will to say: ‘we’re doing this and here’s how we’re doing it.’ If you aren’t doing that I don’t know how you would think things will change.”
Back in Vancouver, Fitzgerald said both women and men in the industry need to be on the same page with diversity, while ensuring people are hired because they’re properly qualified.
“Do I feel I couldn’t get a role because I was a woman? No, I don’t. Do I ever feel I was hired because I was a woman? No, I don’t,” she said. “But that’s a good thing. So maybe we’re getting there.”
Speaking as an (male) American geologist that has studied or taught at four separate universities, there is effectively zero mining industry-student interaction occurring on major campuses. Whose fault is this? It doesn’t matter. What the industry needs to do is to actively go to university campuses and reconnect with geology, chemistry, and engineering departments. With the current vacuum of industry-undergraduate mentorship, students will continue to seek more obvious opportunity and, unfortunately, continue to believe anti-mining sentiment that is non-negligible on campuses across the U.S. US undergraduate demographics in the geological sciences are the best they’ve ever been – close to 50/50 male/female, although there is still much recruiting to be done to balance out ethnic backgrounds (geology students are overwhelmingly white). Many of these students make it to graduation with no idea what kind of job they would like, and few if any consider or even realize the opportunity presented by the mining industry. I would personally drive and coach students from the University of Michigan to PDAC in Toronto every year from 2015-2019 as a graduate student. We had a small SEG chapter at UM, which itself was not easy to start (there was a needlessly exclusive application process), and our only practical connection to industry was our emeritus professor. It was a constant struggle for myself and others to actually make serious connections there, with the occasional exception of a tour of the Barrick office. If it had not been for the internal support of our student group, individually the PDAC experience would have felt cold, exclusive, and potentially futile. I can’t speak for the Canadian students there since they seem to have a much stronger pipeline to industry in place.
Have you ever been told something along the lines of, “You need to go out and find the job, because they aren’t going to come looking for you,”? Well mining industry, the tables have turned. You big companies reading this simply MUST reconnect with universities and colleges, because those students don’t know you exist.
-Tristan Childress