It may be too soon to expect a woman to take the helm of BHP Billiton, but the iron ore giant has revealed an initiative it hopes will lead to greater gender diversity among its management team
It may be too soon to expect a woman to take the helm of BHP Billiton, but the iron ore giant has revealed an initiative it hopes will lead to greater gender diversity among its management team
For every managerial position at BHP, including the top job, there are ‘slates’ filled with names of potential candidates, which must include women.
Speaking outside a Women in Energy and Resources Leadership Summit in Perth today, BHP Billiton head of group investments and value management, Vanessa Torres, said the miner was increasing its efforts to promote greater diversity in its leadership ranks.
“One thing we have is talent management slates, which are (lists of) people who are successors for management jobs,” Ms Torres told Business News.
“The succession plan needs to have diversity on it, and actually that drives people to really identify, before a role is available, who the women in the organisation will be who can actually fill that role.
“Every role in the company we have identified successors who are ready now, who will be ready in a couple of years time, and what are the things that people need to do to get to those levels.”
About 1,600, or 17 per cent, of BHP Billiton’s total WA workforce are female.
Ms Torres said after rolling out an inclusion and diversity council in Melbourne, BHP was now establishing one in Western Australia.
She said despite mass redundancies following the collapse of the iron ore price, the company was committed to improving its diversity due to overwhelming research (and BHP’s own employee perception survey) showing that increased inclusion correlated with increased performance.
“Especially in challenging times like this, (it’s important) to make sure that we are aware of the diversity balance and keep or improve the balance in the workforce,” Ms Torres said.
“We’re keeping the balance the same, we’re trying to really when we’re making those (redundancy) decisions; we have to consider that those decisions should not have a detrimental effect on inclusion and diversity.”
She said good leaders were those who valued differences in staff members’ backgrounds, genders, ages, religion and style, and could translate business cases for diversity into personally relevant aspects of working life for their employees.
