Gender equity unfair to men, insulting to women

Parents, please revise career advice to your sons. Tell them BHP is not the right employer for them.

The Big Australian has turned on men to such an extent that working at this company is so skewed against them that it makes little sense to work hard, do well and look for promotion.

The rigid pursuit of gender equity at all costs has cemented gender inequity if you happen to be a young man looking for a career at BHP. To be sure, gender inequity in mining goes beyond BHP. According to analysis by accounting firm BDO of remuneration data of 57,000 workers in the Australian mining industry, women are appointed to managerial roles nearly a decade earlier than men.

On average women are appointed to their first managerial roles at 42, while men had to wait until they were, on average, 51. Fair? Only if male employees are so lacking in experience as to warrant this difference.

A court case in the US threatens to expose the real-life inequity of this at BHP. Burak Powers worked at BHP in the US. He is suing the Big Australian in a Texas court, claiming punitive damages because he was passed over for promotion in favour of less qualified and experienced women. Powers points to two critical facts: BHP headquarters in Australia set an “aspirational” goal of 50 per cent gender parity by 2025, and the company pays bonuses tied to these sex-based targets to encourage managers to hire women over men.

Powers says BHP is guilty of a “systemic pattern of top-down sex discrimination”. He claims he has received only positive performance reviews since starting at BHP as part of its exclusive Future Emerging Leaders Program. Until he was told his position was abolished. Then he learned the job was re-created, minus an open interview process, and offered to a female worker in Melbourne. On each of three occasions, Powers claims, he was overlooked for promotion while women less qualified than him were promoted.

Maybe Powers has a bad dose of sour grapes that he needs to get over. Alternatively, his claim may expose the inevitable discrimination that flows from former chief executive Andrew Mackenzie’s decision in 2016 to aim for 50-50 gender parity by 2025.

According to BHP’s latest annual report, 26.5 per cent of its employees are women, up from 17 per cent in 2016.

Targets sound like a fine idea. It makes sense to encourage greater female participation in industries men have dominated.

But there is a point when the blind pursuit of equity becomes deeply inequitable. It would be better if schools and broader society encouraged girls to consider subjects and university degrees that led to a career in mining. Much fairer than the BHP model of management trying to shoehorn a 50-50 gender balance from an adult candidate pool that is 26 per cent female. That is a recipe for discrimination, unfairness and poor hiring decisions.

For example, the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission recently found the Queensland Police Service, in search of the magical 50-50 gender balance, has been guilty of discrimination against hundreds of male officers.

The reasons women manifestly prefer some careers over others, competing in many candidate pools in very different numbers to men, deserve much more thinking and research than the frequent ideologically motivated diatribes they have attracted. There are many great reasons fewer women than men may want to start their career down a mine.

Forcing 50-50 gender balance straitjackets on industries where women are 20 to 30 per cent of the candidate pool is also insulting to women. It assumes that women want to participate in all industries in the same ratios as men and any choice to the contrary must be down to the patriarchy and oppressive societal norms.

The sole beneficiaries of these policies are those who push it the most. They have become known as the golden skirts – the 20 to 30 per cent of female members in a candidate pool who may be getting promotions they don’t deserve, up to 10 years earlier than men, going by evidence from the mining industry. The golden skirts have already taken hold of company boards where females are the beneficiaries of quotas.

Just try applying for a board position if you’re an exceptionally talented 60-year-old white bloke. That mix doesn’t tick a single box in corporate Australia any more.

It’s happening elsewhere. At the Bar, gendered briefing policies put young male barristers behind the eight ball.

And now it’s taking hold in large companies such as BHP, where the message to your son is: don’t go to work for BHP or those other companies that make hiring and promotion decisions on the basis of sex. Or if you do take a job there straight out of school, do it for a few years to build your CV. Then skedaddle, before gendered promotions are made. Working for a female manager who was promoted 10 years too early because she’s female rather than a better candidate doesn’t make for a happy workplace.

Trying to distract from the obvious unfairness, defenders of the 50-50 gender straitjacket will claim noble intentions. To reach a kinder, more harmonious and diverse world, you have to break a few eggs. If some meritorious young men need to be sacrificed for the benefit of the greater good, so be it. Defenders of the 50-50 straitjacket will deny it produces discriminatory or unfair results.

Or, as BHP has done, they redefine these words to suit their narrative: so what if a company the size of BHP makes a few hundred decisions each year to promote women who are not as well qualified as a male candidate? That is the price of gender parity Nirvana.

The real-life hitch is that the argument that the collective good justifies the sacrifice of the individual has a long pedigree, much of it ignoble. In fact, the dogged pursuit of the collective over the individual has produced most of history’s worst excesses.

As Jonathan Swift said, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” Maybe the blind will open their eyes when their son is overlooked for a job or a promotion that goes instead to an undeserving gender beneficiary.