Is BHP discriminating against men?

Belinda was full of praise for the facilities South Flank set up to attract women – two gyms, an outdoor pool, library, music room, plus daily events such as aerobic classes, visiting speakers, and nightly cooking classes. Over $100M has been spent on new lighting, CCTV, electronic door locks, and security.

Hmmm – The Big Australian boasts that all this diversity is improving productivity. It must take some very creative accounting to prove that’s the case once you factor in the costs of all this hoopla to keep women happy, don’t you reckon? 

And get this - South Flank is a new mine and highly automated so the mine was forced to actually recreate entry-level roles in order to employ unskilled women. Read this ultra-woke Harvard Business Review article which boasts how it all happened.

Then there’s the problem of retaining these women – a McKinsey analysis shows the major reason for women leaving mining is “work not interesting” - precisely what you would expect from research on women’s interests.

Meanwhile the cheery young Belinda was most impressed by how easy it all was for her, boasting it had only taken a few weeks of training to get her into the large dump truck she’s now driving. 

“Women take more care of the trucks than men,” she told me. That’s the mantra that pops up constantly when you ask about the BHP boast of a better safety record for women, with “67% lower recordable injury rates.” Of course, the analysis which produced that impressive figure is never presented but you can bet it’s partly due to men still mainly doing the tough, dangerous jobs in the industry while most of the women are safely ensconced in HR, admin and the cushy end of the business.

Belinda was proud that one of her group was already being promoted into a team leader role. I’ve heard from men working in this mine about the problems of women thrust into supervisory roles with absolutely no experience. “It’s utter chaos,” one correspondent told me. “The site has developed such a bad reputation that many men refuse to work there. One contractor refused to contract to the site because of severe safety concerns. Just a few weeks ago a truck laden with explosives was rolled.”

There’s no way of verifying such stories, and no one dares go on the record talking about what is going on. “If it comes out you’ve talked about this stuff, you’ll lose your job and never be employed in the industry again,” the bloke told me.

But it’s obvious that many men in the industry are very wary about women, as this mining contractor explains:

It’s a very weird time up here at the moment. Can’t trust females. I’ve seen women flirt with blokes to have them do their work. Women can be very lazy and not wanting to get dirty (especially working visa women who don’t give a shit about the industry – they only want the money). But I’ve also known women who really earn what they get paid, women who excel at their job. I tend to stay away from the female workforce up here and generally have them swapped out of my crew - I don’t wanna lose my job because some female gets hurt feelings after being lazy at her job.

What happens if you push thousands of  young women into a very traditional male workforce? Pretty naturally the industry has been flooded with reports of men behaving badly. We’re currently seeing a huge campaign to change the mining culture “to keep women safe”, after the usual cooked-up “survey” showed heaps of predatory male behaviour, as usual mainly unwanted staring and the like. The result is they are wheeling out rape kits at mine sites, setting up a FIFO sex offenders register, and even introducing robotic dogs at Gina Reinhart’s Roy Hill mine for surveillance of misbehaving men.

Robotic dogs? I’m not kidding. I was sceptical when I first saw this video suggesting this was happening but there’s plenty online about ANGUS, the Autonomous Security Robot, designed to “ensure people feel safe on the site.”

I’m receiving reports of teasing women deliberately getting men into trouble with the result that the man immediately loses his job: “Would a company accept a single male denial and not sack him when society is already sold on males in mining being sexual predators? No company wants bad publicity. I’ve adopted a policy of ‘say something to a woman only if they ask,” one nervous man explained. 

Recently WA mines minister Bill Johnstonresponded to complaints that the mining culture is “a cesspit of predatory sexual behaviour against women,” by saying the best way to solve the issue was to add more women to the mix. How do you like that? They create the problem by pushing young women into this ultra male culture – and solve it by getting rid of men.  That’s the world we live in.