The world is changing, and at BHP we are excited about the opportunity we have to play our part in this change. BHP is a world-leading resources company. Our corporate purpose is to bring people and resources together to build a better world. We do this through our strategy: to have the best capabilities, best commodities and best assets, to create long-term value and high returns. We are among the world’s top producers of major commodities, including iron ore, metallurgical coal and copper.
With more than 80,000 employees and contractors, working across 90 locations worldwide, our people sit at the very heart of everything we do. At BHP, we are focused on creating a safe workplace where our people feel connected to our values and objectives and where the capability of our people is key to our success.
We have been committed to improving female representation, and have been measuring our progress, for many years. But 2016 was a pivotal year. Female employee representation across the resources industry was around 16 per cent. At BHP, only 17.6 per cent of our employees were women. Extrapolating our rate of progress at the time, we calculated that it would have taken us decades to achieve gender balance. So, in order to stimulate greater focus and pace, we formally committed to an aspirational goal to achieve gender balance in 2025. We required leaders to develop specific plans and initiate actions to make this goal a reality. And we were made accountable for progress against those plans, including through our remuneration outcomes. This approach is consistent with any other BHP strategic priority.
Today, more than 40 per cent of our senior executives are female and our Executive Leadership Team has been gender balanced for some time now. Our overall female representation has more than doubled to more than 35 per cent. The workforce at BHP’s newest iron ore mine, South Flank in Western Australia, is 40 per cent female and 15 per cent Indigenous.
The changes underway in BHP continue to be transformational. A gender balanced workforce, built upon an inclusive, performance-oriented culture, is critical to BHP’s ongoing success. Our aim is a workforce of the best and brightest, representative of the communities in which we operate. We need people with diverse backgrounds, professional experience and skills, bringing new ideas and effort to the goal of sustainably providing the metals and minerals the world needs, and to enable us to win against the competition.
We're changing things up by asking everyone what their ‘flex’ looks like so we can create new definitions of flexibility where traditionally there has been none. We’ve found this to be the single biggest driver in helping us to promote greater workforce diversity – and that’s why it continues to be a key focus for BHP.
