Mining for Equity

Mining engineer Carly CHURCH’01 is bringing as many women as she can into the male-dominated fi eld she loves

BY CHRIS DANIELS

One-billion-dollar construction developments don’t just happen. In the mining sector, Carly Church has managed a project of that value in Ontario and has consulted as an engineer at gold and silver mines in the interior of British Columbia and as far away as a diamond mine in Botswana, Africa. From feasibility plans through to inception, she has worked on designs for everything from mine shaft s, mineral processing plants and workers’ camps to on-site road and energy infrastructures for crews to be able to safely live and work.

Th e fi eld is exciting and dynamic, yet most mining engineers are male. At a mining company Carly worked at a few years ago, the offi ce didn’t have a large split between genders, as women were well-represented in environmental, social and corporate governance, accounting and human resources, but not in engineering and operations. Carly has been passionate about widening inclusion and promoting women’s career opportunities in the fi eld. She mentors student engineers at UBC, where she earned her mechanical engineering degree in 2006, and is involved with Women in Mining, an organization dedicated to creating an industry that empowers women.

Now, at JDS Energy & Mining in Vancouver, where she has been a senior engineer and project manager since 2017, “we have been hiring just as many female junior mining engineers as men, if not more, which is a big change over the last little while,” she says.

Th e issues that have held women back from a career in mining are multi-faceted. For starters, says Carly, not enough girls are exposed to the opportunity and what it might look like. “Th e work is broader than what people might expect,” she says, noting she can go from highlevel desktop design work to a site visit where she is the liaison with First Nations groups on community engagement.

Some women who do enter this profession end up leaving because of repressive experiences in their internships or fi rst jobs. “It is not that they couldn’t cut it, but basically because they were pushed out,” says Carly. “And so it is all well and good to encourage women to get into mining, but we also have to ensure that when they get there they have a good experience, and want to continue in the fi eld.”

So how did Carly end up in a profession perceived to be monopolized by men? Funnily enough, her uncle was a mining engineer, but being born and raised in downtown Toronto, “it had never really been on my radar growing up.” She credits in large part her education at Branksome, which she says never made her feel limited to certain career paths.

“I was a good student, but being academically inclined wasn’t a unique feature for a Branksome student,” she says. “I also liked sports, was on the fi eld hockey, ice hockey and rugby teams, and liked to be social. I was never pigeonholed as a bookworm or an athlete, or felt anything I was doing was unusual.”

As Grade 10 approached, Carly decided to switch to a local public school because she missed some friends. But she was one of only two girls in her advanced math class at the school and didn’t feel comfortable. “And I love math. If I hadn’t already had my experience at Branksome, I might have thought, ‘Oh, I don’t like math,’ and excluded myself, not realizing it was actually the environment I didn’t like.”

She returned to Branksome and was much happier. In addition to her supportive school, her friends and family, including her father, who ran his own construction business, and her mother, a high school teacher, never ques-

“It is all well and good to encourage

women to get into mining, but we also have to ensure that when they get there they have a good experience, and want to continue in the fi eld.”

tioned why she would go into mechanical engineering.

Neither did she. “I was interested in math and science, and engineering aligned with my interests,” she says. “It was only when I showed up on my fi rst day of class at UBC, and saw mostly guys, that I realized how unique I was. But I didn’t go in with a chip on my shoulder about being one of the few girls, because I had come from a school where it was encouraged to have those interests.”

Carly’s fi rst job out of university wasn’t in mining, but product design for a digital imaging company from 2004 to 2008. “When I looked at the career trajectory of people at the company, I didn’t see it as being a long-term possibility for me,” she says.

What she did next ultimately prepared her for a fl ourishing career in mining. “I decided to go to Australia for my master’s in technology management, which honestly was a glorifi ed reason to go travel,” Carly says with a laugh.

In the seven months before starting her studies at the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Carly criss-crossed the globe, on her way to visiting all seven continents, including Antarctica. “Th at was a 12-day trip from the southern tip of Argentina,” she says. “I even went crosscountry skiing on Antarctica.”

Her globe-trotting improved her networking skills—“I had to make friends along the way”—and further built her confi dence, as she had to problem-solve through foreign, sometimes challenging situations as a single woman travelling alone.

“It later translated into my work, because in male-dominated industries women can be second-guessed and undermined,” she says. “But I had the confi dence in myself, of knowing who I am and what I can do.”

In 2013, she landed her fi rst mining job, doing construction and project coordination, before joining JDS, and knew she had found her calling.

“No day is the same,” she says. “It is the diversity of the work that I really love about this fi eld.” R

Chris Daniels is a Toronto freelance writer and editor.