World’s largest miner says workforce will by 50% female by 2025

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BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining group, is on track to meet its target of a 50 per cent female workforce by 2025, after increasing the number of women working for the company by 40 per cent in recent years.

The Anglo-Australian firm has introduced several initiatives aimed at increasing hiring of women, and has employed 2,000 women and just 500 men since it introduced its 50 per cent target in 2016, the Financial Times reported.

This has pushed the proportion of female workers on its 26,000-strong staff from 17.6 per cent up to 22.4 per cent.

Part of its strategy for increasing the number of women joining the company includes allowing more flexible working.

Athalie Williams, chief people officer at the Anglo-Australian company, said this was the key to ensuring that women stayed at BHP and did not feel they had to leave to raise a family.

“We’ve got to have balanced hiring and balanced retention - so it’s not a revolving door where we bring women in and they don’t stay,” she said.

BHP’s target, announced two years ago, came as a surprise to the mining industry, which has a poor track record in making diverse hires. According to a 2015 report by PwC, just 11.1 per cent of board members within the top 100 mining companies were female.

At the time, BHP’s chief executive officer Andrew Mackenzie said: “Without new initiatives it would take us 30 years just to get to 30 per cent female representation.

“More must, and will, be done. And our 2025 aspirational goal is to achieve gender balance at all levels of the organization over the next decade.”

This week, Ms Williams said the target had given BHP “the space to have conversations and to understand the way our organisation works in a way that we wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t set the target”.

“I believe we’ll get there and we’re on track,” she said. “The resources industry hasn’t traditionally been attractive to women.

“How do we rebrand and make people see that future roles in mining are not a white man in a hard hat with a dirty face but a place of technological innovation?”

Earlier this year, BHP Billiton reported a 15.7 per cent gender gap in hourly pay for its UK workforce, while the average bonus paid to female staff was 0.8 per cent higher than for male employees.