LEADING BY EXAMPLE

Pymble Ladies’ College principal Dr Kate Hadwen cites three simple steps that schools, organisations, industry groups and individuals can take to embrace workplace diversity.

Update procurement policies

Pymble has changed its procurement policy to only partner with businesses that have women in their senior leadership teams. “It sends a clear message to potential partners, the business world and our community: we are serious about continuing to support our students –indeed all women – beyond the school years and in the workplace,” Hadwen says.

Focus on the first point of promotion

“Research indicates that it’s the first promotion from employee to manager where the greatest gender disparity can occur,” says Hadwen, who suggests that organisations who focus on developing this pool of women, will support a bigger pool of female CEOs, CFOs and board chairs in years to come.

Support girls in the workplace

Studies show that boys are more likely than girls to know what their parents do for work, with the gap greatest in families where fathers work in male-dominated fields such as technology, finance and construction. “Parents are the single greatest influencers in their children’s careers – imagine the impact if all organisations set aside one day or even one morning to ‘bring your daughter to work’.”

McVay applauds company-wide strategies to reduce the gender pay gap and improve retention; for example, Google ran “pay transparency” exercises comparing salaries across job grades and continues to offer promotion for people on parental leave.

But she believes there is more to do at a government level; for example, she says, “support for universal access to affordable childcare will directly impact on women’s participation”.

Mining’s workforce evolution

Around 20 per cent of the 280,000 or so people working in mining in Australia are female – a proportion that has more than doubled over the past 20 years, according to

Nicole Brook, the president of the resources sector’s 14,000-member peak body Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM).

“The resources sector has grown 28 per cent over the last five years, and that will grow even more as the world undergoes a massive energy transition – we will need 10 times as much lithium in 2030 as we used in 2020, for example,” says Brook.

She says this drastic change demands plenty of innovation and will open up opportunities for a broader range of people, work types and skill sets. Traditional roles like geologists and mining engineers are expected to be supplemented by data analysts, machine learning specialists and robotics experts, among many others.

“Mining is becoming far more automated, increasing opportunities for women as it removes barriers and challenges that women faced in the past,” Brook says.

Her own career began several decades ago when, as a fresh-faced mining engineering graduate, she was the only woman working hundreds of metres underground at Tahmoor Colliery in the Southern Highlands region of NSW.

That’s unusual these days, she says. Rio Tinto reports that 58 per cent of its new graduate hires are female, while BHP reports that women make up 47 per cent of all new hirings.

“The industry has been working for many years to address the gender pay gap in the mining industry,” she says. However, there remain few women in senior roles, and a large percentage of women leave the industry after a few years – leaving fewer role models for those coming through the ranks.

AusIMM runs an extensive women’s mentoring program, from which sponsorship often emerges.

The difference? “Mentorship involves someone talking to you – sponsorship is someone talking about you,” says Brook, who says she’s personally benefited from such opportunity.

“Sponsors recognise high potential individuals and endorse them to other people. It’s not something formal, and it’s susceptible to affinity bias, where people recommend others who look, think and act like them.”

But Brook says that diversity and inclusion training can raise awareness of, and challenge, these inherent biases.