Tag Archives: women

Where Are the Women in Mining?

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Glencore remains the only FTSE 100 company that does not have a woman on its board of directors. At the shareholder’s meeting at the start of this week, Chairman Tony Hayward promised that the company would remedy the situation by year’s end; but some big institutional investors have grown impatient, and UK business secretary Vince Cable said “it is simply not credible that one company cannot find any suitable women.”

The problem is industry-wide. A 2013 report by Amanda van Dyke (of Palisade Capital and Chair of the organization Women in Mining) and Stephney Dallmann (of PwC) found that mining companies “have the lowest number of women on boards of any listed industry group in the world.”

Maybe that doesn’t come as a great surprise to those familiar with mining, but within the industry there are companies who seem to be doing more than bluffing or hoping the issue will go away. Most of those are high profile global players. Women’s numbers decline steadily as we move down the ranks to the so-called juniors; and the likelihood that women will have a board seat or participate in a board committee also varies by territory. (South Africa leads the pack: over 21% of the committee seats of listed South African mining companies are occupied by women.)

Canada boasts the highest number of listed mining companies, and the “large mining companies in Canada are much further down the road [than smaller firms] in terms of their understanding of the importance of the role women play on boards.” The top-tier Canadian companies with high market capitalization (and the increased visibility that comes with size) have nearly 14% of board directorships held by women, but among the bottom 400 of the world’s top 500 miners, Canada has “the lowest participation on board committees by women, at 5.9%.”

The authors acknowledge that many of these companies are at early stages of development and they have only a few board seats to fill; but if they expect to grow and mature (as they do), there is no time like the present to lead or at least follow the lead of the big league players. When the same men keep winning the game of musical chairs — and when they sit next to each other (as they do) not just on one board, but on several, and their affiliations stretch back over decades — the result is likely to be not just over-familiarity but insularity, both of which are likely to impair and impede judgment. Meetings become a day at the club; the boardroom becomes an echo chamber.

As van Dyke and Dallmann note in a 2014 follow up report, it’s misleading to say, as many mining company executives do when pressed, that the small number of women directors correlates in a meaningful way with the lack of women with mining-related degrees. Only 32% of men on boards of mining companies have an engineering degree. So “there is no shortage of women in the talent pool;” according to van Dyke and Dallmann, “there is simply a perception of a lack of available female talent.”

This blinkered view of reality has real-world consequences, for shareholders and stakeholders in the communities where the miners operate. Mining companies with women on their boards see performance improvements on a number of fronts, from financial to social and environmental performance. “Sustainability” — as measured by water use, Bloomberg ESG score, UN Global Compact participation, Community Spend, and CSR or Sustainability Committee — improves across the board. For example, average total water use by mining companies “decreases steadily with an increase of women” in director roles — though it’s not entirely clear to me why that should be so — and “the amount [mining] companies spend on community projects and initiatives increases with the number of women on the board.” The authors are careful not to urge any hasty conclusions, but after surveying the data they are compelled to suggest that “the security of a company’s social licence to operate may be improved by having women on the board.”

I would go one step further: it’s difficult to countenance a mining company asking for social license to operate even as it deliberately insulates itself from social reality.

What Do Women Want? What They’re Asking For

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Sasha Galbraith has a piece on Forbes today about Megan Brown, who launched a company called HatchedIt — a social calendar app, for planning, managing and coordinating events with friends and family. Much of it reads like a press release, a fluff piece about an entrepreneurial Mommy blogger, ripe for the kind of satire that Paul Rudnick dished out in The New Yorker last week. (But not, I should note, before Ruth Fowler beat him to the punch.)

What caught my eye was the title (“Lesson From a Woman of Wall Street: Ask For What You Want”), which promised to say something about asking; and what redeemed the article and kept it from being all fluff was Brown’s account of her rise through the male-dominated ranks of finance and her mockery of the “empty suits” with whom she used to work: “they all use a bevy of analogies like, ‘We all need to be rowing in the same direction’ and ‘picking the low-hanging fruit.’ You can’t understand anything they’re saying, but all the other men think they sound brilliant.” So here, I thought, is a woman schooled in the workings of power and language in the world of business.

For Brown, asking is something men expect; but it’s not something women do:

I also think there is a different way to manage men than you manage women… Men respond differently. I have to remind myself when dealing with a man, you need to be direct; you need to ask for what you need upfront; and you need to not be embarrassed or apologize. It’s a skill set that took me a long time to really understand in finance and I had to learn quickly to ramp up my career. But if not for those experiences, I don’t think I would understand that now, especially as we are looking for funding and partnerships, you really need to ask for what you want. And for a lot of women [in any industry or situation], that’s challenging.”

The trouble with this advice is that it rehearses stereotypes Brown probably learned from hanging around those empty suits. As research from the organization Catalyst shows, “it’s simply untrue” that women don’t ask.

For example, by looking at the career paths of over 4000 MBA grads from around the world, Catalyst found that women were more likely than men to ask for a variety of skill-building experiences and to proactively seek training opportunities. And we also found that women and men negotiated for a higher level position or greater compensation during the hiring process for their current job at equal rates.

Women do ask –but get little in return. Equally skilled men advance farther and more quickly than their female peers. In fact, we found that the $4600 pay gap that starts from day one grew to more than $31,000 several years down the track—even when women asked.

The Catalyst study concedes that “women who toot their own horn do get ahead –and are happier at work too,” but tooting your own horn is not really the same as asking. The issue is that when women ask, their requests are not being met. In a Washington Post article, Catalyst researchers Nancy Carter and Christine Silva point out that “people routinely take a tougher stance against women in negotiations than they do against men” and that talent management systems can be biased against women.

If entrenched sexism in the business environment affects everything from how women are received when they ask, to what they think they can ask for, as well as ideas of what power looks like, how it’s created and how it’s shared, then it might conceivably prevent some women from asking for what they want, or make it seem “challenging” to do so, as Megan Brown says. But I’m afraid that merely advising women “to ask for what you need upfront” is a bit like telling them they just have to lean in.