Maureen Jensen: mining a fantastic career for securities commission head.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: Women in Mining

But for a twist of fate, Maureen Jensen may never have become a geologist.

Jensen, the daughter of a Falconbridge mining engineer who grew up in Sudbury, was studying pre-med at the University of Toronto when a course in geology piqued her curiosity. Immediately, she was hooked.

"I decided that I wanted to be a geologist, not a doctor, and, of course, my mother cried about it for three years," she laughed. "I love it, and I still think of myself as a geologist, even though I'm not working in that field anymore."

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As executive director and CAO of the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), Jensen oversees the body that administers and enforces securities law in the province of Ontario. The office is responsible for establishing standards surrounding reporting in mineral exploration.

Jensen started out in hard-rock geology, with a focus on base metals and gold, working in mines and on exploration projects all over North America, Mexico, Central America, South Africa and the U.S. She has been a prospector, and founded a couple of junior mining companies with her husband, Torben.

Following the Bre-X scandal in the mid-1990s, she was named to the Mining Standards Task Force, designed to clean up mining reporting standards. Sixty-four of the 66 published recommendations have been implemented.

Though the OSC received some pushback at the time, the regulations have transformed the industry.

"These rules are a sea change in the world, and Canada is now looked on as the best jurisdiction for this kind of disclosure; it has pushed a lot of the standards globally," Jensen said. "(Investors) invest in the Canadian disclosure regime because they can understand what the companies are doing better and they can compare what they're talking about because they all have to report under the same standard."

It hasn't always been smooth sailing for Jensen. One of 10 women in a graduating class of 35--she remains friends with many of her former classmates--she did struggle as a woman trying to make it in the business.

In her early years, Jensen said, it was hard to get field work and she was given any number of excuses to prevent her from experiencing it: there was only one toilet on site, there weren't separate facilities for women, she wouldn't like living in a tent for three months.

Because it was so hard to get those jobs, she found herself fighting hard for them. And it persisted into the corporate side of the sector.

"Almost exclusively I...