A successful mining executive has revealed the challenges of being a woman in the industry, with some calling her a mere ‘diversity asset’.
Sienna Mallon, 27, moved from Victoria to regional Queensland two years ago after transitioning from farming.
Her dedication to her role in the Rockhampton mining industry resulted in a rapid promotion to her current position as site manager.
According to job board Seek, the average salary in mining is between $125,000 and $145,000 per year.
Ms Mallon said there were constant doubts about her abilities, with male colleagues claiming she was only there because of her gender.
“Now that we have quotas to increase female representation, there is a perception that women are less competent,” Ms Mallon said Yeah.
“The only explanation they give is that I was hired to meet a diversity quota,” Mallon said.
Ms Mallon advocates for more female participation in the sector, but says she suffers from ‘impostor syndrome’ and frustration, saying she is seen as a product of a diversity initiative rather than a merit.
Sienna Mallon made a well-paid move into mining, but revealed a major problem in the sector
She documents her work on TikTok and now has an audience of 176,000 followers.
Many of her videos show the challenges and rewards of working in the mines, and some show young women that they can earn high salaries in a male-dominated field.
In a video, she said that young women understand that mining is hard work and that they just want equal treatment on the construction site.
“I hear men and women every day saying they don’t want more women in mining because they want special treatment,” she said in the clip.
“But one thing I’ve never heard a girl in this industry, or an industry like this, say to me, (is that) they want special treatment. I’ve never heard it.
She compared the perception of her female colleagues with that of the men in the mining industry.
‘Women go to the site and it’s assumed they’re not competent and then we have to prove that we are. Whereas men come to the site and it’s assumed they’re competent until they prove they’re not.
“We’re not afraid of the difficult, we’re afraid of being treated differently,” she said.
She said women in mining felt unsafe in the workplace because of perceptions about their role there.
‘We’re afraid that we won’t feel safe enough to go to the toilet during the night shift, we’re afraid that we won’t feel safe enough to go to bed because we’re all alone and we don’t have anyone around us that we feel safe with.’
‘You’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s no one around you. You hope that the people around you will do the right thing.
‘I don’t know many men who think about this when they take a job in mining, but I know that every woman I’ve ever met has considered this detail.
The 27-year-old said female employees are seen as ‘diversity assets’ rather than being recognised for it
“We’re not asking for easy, we’re asking for fair.”
The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows there were 45,000 women working in the sector in 2022, compared to 8,700 in 2002. That’s an increase of about 417 percent over the past two decades.
Women still lag behind men in participation, making up about 20 percent of full-time workers.
Some companies have introduced gender quotas to address the low participation rate of women. According to Mallon, this can help to get more women into the sector, but it cannot help them to combat stereotyping in the workplace.
“They may get a foot in the door because there are gender quotas. But the quota is there to give them a chance to be looked at, to force managers to stop unconscious bias and force them to look at it,” she told Yahoo.