What a Remote Australian Mine Can Teach Us About Gender-Balanced Workplaces
Women comprise about 10% of workers at large mines globally. But at South Flank, an iron ore mine in Western Australia, women account for 40% of the 869 frontline jobs.
About four years ago I was contacted by an editor at a relatively niche trade publication called Construction News. He was looking for a journalist who would be willing and able to report and write a feature for the outlet on why it was high time for the most male-dominated industries to take seriously the challenge of closing the gender pay gap and creating gender-balanced workplaces.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’d never written for Construction News before, but I was intrigued and impressed by the trade publication’s efforts to cover a topic that arguably wouldn’t usually be top of mind in the space. I accepted the commission, filed the piece and learned much in the process.
One of the first women I spoke to in my reporting for the article was Rebecca Owens. Two years earlier, Owens had just started her final year at a top-rated UK university when she began seriously considering her career options. She had been one of only a handful of women on her engineering course, and was on track to graduate with a first-class degree.
“It was a nice position to be in,” she told me in an interview. “I had applied to a few graduate schemes and had some good offers already. Lots of my friends were still waiting to hear back.”
But Owens was also deeply torn about which route to take, she explained. “On the one hand, I wanted to stay in engineering because that was what I enjoyed and was good at, but on the other hand, there were plenty of reasons why working in another industry was more appealing,” she reflected.
In the end, Owens chose to join an investment bank in the City of London, partially drawn by a higher salary, but also because she feared the engineering world and construction sector were still too much of a man's domain. “I didn't speak to a single woman while interviewing for jobs in the construction and engineering sectors,” she recalled. “That really put me off.”
The interview that I did with Rebecca Owens stayed with me. Of course we all understand the importance of having a role model at work, but hearing first hand that lacking a role model altered the course of this young woman’s career at such an early stage, was quite jarring. When Owen’s was exploring the industry, she didn’t see anyone who resembled her. That made her feel like this was not the space for her and it immediately led her to decide to turn her back on a sector in which she may well have thrived. It’s sad. But also understandable.
This week, I thought of Rebecca Owens, when I saw an article in Harvard Business Review about a remote mine in Australia which somehow managed to become a model of a gender-balanced workplace.
In the piece, authors Erik Denison and Richard Pringle, who are both academics at Monash University in Australia, report that mining, like construction, is a vastly male-dominated profession. Indeed, women comprise only about 10% of workers at large mines globally. But South Flank, an iron ore mine in Western Australia which is operated by BHP, has managed to create a workforce in which 40% of the 869 frontline employees are women. Four out of six senior managers are women, too.
Denison and Pringle were initially hired by South Flank to deliver workshops on the topic of changing sexist and homophobic behaviors in traditionally male-dominated settings, but when they arrived at the mine—which is in an extremely remote location that also happens to be one of the hottest places on the planet— they took it upon themselves to conduct research and to understand just how South Flank had managed, against the odds, to create such balance despite the mining industry’s traditional gender homogeneity.
The authors eventually ended up distilling their findings down to a few points, the first of which was that the general manager of the mine was extremely engaged and had demonstrated a personal commitment to hitting gender targets for middle managers. “Targets work to drive action on diversity and, importantly, they are a normal and a highly effective tool used in mining to achieve better business outcomes,” the authors explain. Crucially, these middle managers were also given the autonomy to be able to restructure their teams in ways that would enable them to hit targets. Here’s how the authors explain it:
“[Middle managers are], for example, [...] allowed to restructure their departments to recreate entry-level roles, which has increased the pipeline of potential workers. This is important because most men working in mining were hired without skills and were given the opportunity to learn on the job. Problematically, for women, most entry-level roles have been eliminated at modern, technology-heavy mining operations. By recreating entry-level roles, South Flank has been able to hire women with a wide variety of professional backgrounds (e.g., farmers, nurses, truck drivers, mechanics, athletes, teachers, hair stylists) who have since become skilled mining employees.”
Other features of the South Flank workplace that I found particularly interesting included that the mine had invested heavily in creating inclusive social programs for workers (because of the remote location, workers travel to the mine for six days at a time meaning that they live and work in close proximity to each other). The company had also made huge investments in safety systems. That was particularly important considering that a recent government inquiry had found a high rate of sexual assaults and sexual harassment within the mining industry more broadly.
Finally, I was encouraged that South Flank’s leaders explicitly acknowledged that one thing that had historically prevented women from moving into male-dominated jobs in industries like mining, was a preconceived notion that women just didn’t want to do those kinds of jobs. It’s a myth, the authors report, that “women do not want high-paying mining jobs driving trucks, blasting rocks, and fixing heavy machinery.”
Sure, women don’t want to work in environments that are exclusionary or in which they don’t feel safe, but then again, who would want to work in that kind of environment? To me, the South Flank case study persuasively demonstrates what’s possible in terms of gender if we—ironically, perhaps—actually look beyond gender and focus on creating workplaces in which everyone can thrive. Yes, targets like the ones South Flank has implemented can be a means to an end, but what really leads to success, is a concerted effort to understand what humans need in order to feel valued: a sense of belonging. A sense that they have a right to be here.
A little house-keeping note: over the summer I’ll be reducing the frequency of this newsletter to one post a week as I take some time off and spend time with family.
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