Our Women of Sibanye-Stillwater initiative at the SA and US operations addresses inequalities and barriers to female employment and ensures our organisation treats women fairly, acknowledging that we must play our part in balancing what has historically been a male-dominated industry.
Highlights from 2022
In 2022
Women represented:
16.2%
of all employees
31%
of the board
35%
of new recruits in SA
26
women awarded level-appropriate
scholarships with Henley Africa
Pay-parity
gaps addressed
23%
of SA promotions approved in
2022 were female
In 2022, we constituted a Diversity Equity and Inclusion Council (DEIC) to accelerate the building of an inclusive business, whereby people of all nationalities, races, genders, sexual preferences, political and religious affiliations will be recognised in the Sibanye-Stillwater ecosystem for the distinctive value that they contribute.
Through Women-in-Mining (WiM) we aim to encourage more women to join the mining industry, to increase the percentage of female employees and to promote higher female representation in leadership roles.
Our WiM initiative is called “Women of Sibanye-Stillwater”. This is where we continue to focus on technology and innovation as a means to promote women in the workforce. At the SA operations we have two semi-autonomous LHDs operated by women.
Our Cadetship programme creates an opportunity to expose women to the mining industry and 49% of our cadets are women.
Approximately 22% of our R28.3 billion discretionary procurement spend was specifically sourced from women-owned businesses, many of which have benefited from the Company’s training and enterprise supplier development funding.
A CLOSER LOOK
Progress has been made of which the most material step is promoting women’s safety underground. GBV is a profound and widespread problem in South Africa. Sibanye-Stillwater affirms that this is totally unacceptable and we are deeply committed to protecting women. In 2022, we continued our antisexual harassment campaigns and included anti-sexual harassment training in our induction training. Our Harassment procedure governs how to deal with sexual harassment cases. A sexual misconduct unit of Protection services handles all reported sexual harassment cases, and counselling is provided to affected employees.
In 2022, we established GBV reporting and referral centres at our SA PGM and SA gold operations. Further, we introduced online
GBV training, and launched a GBV sexual harassment reporting platform (app, email, phone). We had 19 GBV related cases which is inclusive of 16 reported sexual harassment cases of which six cases are closed and ten cases under investigation.
The status of pay-parity has been tracked and corrected where required. We have dealt with legacy issues of disparity of pay based on race and gender; pay gaps are linked to legacy-related aspects largely stemming from the impact of mergers and acquisitions; it is also related to more men in employment and longer years of service.
Of our top 10% compensated employees, 15.84% are women.
An ergonomic study is underway to gain insight to how the physical aspects of the working environment can be improved.
To make change rooms more amenable for woman, the rooms are being retrofitted while new change houses (for example at the K4 project) have been constructed to allow for these requirements. We also continue to evolve PPE for women, to ensure proper fit, comfort, and protection. We are also using the 4B shaft decline operation at the SA PGM: Marikana operations as a training area for WiM trainees with the intention to deploy and integrate women to the vertical operational teams over time.
Our US PGM operations have designed and built a prototype lactation pod for use underground at our East Boulder mine, in addition to the surface on-site lactation rooms.
Women Voice Workshops
This two-day workshop is conducted monthly across the business by our Organisational Growth team. The objectives of this two-day workshop is
- To gain an understanding of the Women-in-Mining programme
- To encourage, empower, enable, and support each other as women
- To reflect on who you are as a woman in Sibanye-Stillwater and to together, consider alternative ways of functioning effectively in the mining environment
- To explore our relationships with other women and establish supportive networks
- To identify and build on some of your strengths as a Sibanye-Stillwater employee
Steel woman programme
At our SA operations the steel woman programme was launched as part of the WiM roadshow. Sibanye-Stillwater has partnered
with Henley Africa to provide an opportunity to women employees to enrol for various qualifications, from a higher certificate in
management practice to an international MBA. The programme allowed for 100 women candidates to attend a learning journey
(consisting of 4 x 2-hour masterclasses), concluding with an assignment. 26 women were awarded level-appropriate scholarships with Henley Africa. We will continue with a second phase of this initiative in 2023, with 32 additional level-appropriate scholarships to be awarded to women.
The GEI “tracks the performance of public companies committed to disclosing their efforts to support gender equality through policy development, representation and transparency” (from Bloomberg’s website). The index helps companies improve their reporting on gender and benchmark themselves against a global standard; and it helps investors identify companies who are committed to gender equality. In 2023 we were included in the Bloomberg GEI, one of 484 companies globally and one of only eight in South Africa. Our inclusion is evidence of a high level of disclosure and overall performance across the framework’s five pillars.
