Digging into diversity in mining: personal reflections of panel reflect that "there's still a lot to do," importance of doing it for the "right reasons".

• Author: Myers, Ella
• Position: MINING

When Anna Tudela walked into her first mining conference, she was the only women in a room packed with men. She was sure she had found the wrong place.

In October, the vice-president of diversity, regulatory affairs and corporate secretary at Goldcorp was happy to see other women at the Maintenance, Engineering and Reliability/Mine Operations Conference (MeMO) in Sudbury, where she participated in a panel on diversity and inclusion. Tudela was joined by Jennifer Maki, executive director of Vale Base Metals, and Sudbury's own Ron Sarazin, special projects coordinator at Gezhtoojig Employment and Training.

The panelists tackled gender, Indigenous peoples, immigrant labour, and mental health and wellness in mining, focusing primarily on the first two.

A common thread throughout the evening was that things are better than they were, but as Maki said, "it's early on in our journey and we still have a long way to go." Maki shared Tudela's experience of feeling like part of a small faction in her field.

"I've been in this role now for two years next month, and each year you get invited to a dinner with all the CEOs in North America in mining, but when you walk into that room for dinner, there are 120 men and probably less than five women," said Maki. "No matter where you are in your career, I can share with you, it's still daunting to walk into that room."

However, Maki hopes that growing evidence will encourage companies to draw more on women in the workforce.

"Years of research that show that companies with more female leadership have better financial results," pointed out Maki. "The programs that we've recently launched [at Vale], it's the right thing to do." Tudela now runs programming for Goldcorp in South America that trains young women to help fill the need for employees in the field. The programs have graduated more than 1,350 women since 2010, and led to the development of other programs that build on those skills.

As someone who pairs employees with employers, Sarazin said Gezhtoojig does find it more of a challenge to get women into the workforce, but he thinks many traditional First Nations roles in mining communities prepare women well for corporate leadership.

"The women have raised their kids and they're very traditional where the family comes first. If you walk into a community, the grandmother runs the ship," said Sarazin. "These...