Outlook of Women in Mining and Energy in Indonesia by Maya Muchlis from WiME

Published May 2019 by Tatiza Gondim, Marketing Manager, Coaltrans Events

 

Outlook of Women in Mining & Energy in Indonesia

Gender disparity and women participation in development has become global attention. Women
participation is perceived to play a critical role in efforts for poverty alleviation. In 2016, the
Gender Development Index in Indonesia (GDI) is 92.6 compared to the global average at 94.11.
Gender Empowerment Index (GEI) increases every year, but the gap between men and women
in Indonesia remains. Moreover, due to the persistent social and gender inequalities in access to income distribution, natural resources, health and education opportunities, women and girls are more likely vulnerable to poverty. In Indonesia, women participation in the labour market is only 51.3 per cent compared to 84.4 of men (UNDP, HDR Report 2014).

Equal participation of both women and men is crucial to driving economic growth to its full potential due to women have an equal role in it. One of the biggest challenges that we have currently dealt with is to close the gender equality gap, especially in the mining and energy Industry. There were only 6.7% of female employees work in the mining sector while males were accounted for 93.7% (BPS Data, 2016).

Various contributed factors that associated to the problem could be minimum policies that attract more women to participate in, limited resources in the market that match with company requirements and minimum awareness of the importance of gender equality to be adopted at the Corporate senior management level. Multiple reasons had led to those factors and they could link to social norms, differences in education levels, lack of access to general services and cultural factors. It is believed that education plays an important role to strengthen the capacity about the importance of gender equality in the mining & energy sector. This cover business leadership and management and recruitment and retention strategy.

 

Business Leadership & Management

The business case is clear; gender diversity in business leadership can have a significant impact on corporate culture and performance. It is now increasingly acknowledged that advancing women in leadership are the right thing to do and it makes business sense. According to the BPS data in 2016, the percentage of women hold the position in the managerial level was accounted for 24.17% while men were more than triple (BPS, 2016). Another data also revealed that in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries where female CEO was accounted only less than 5% in the publicly listed companies (She Works Report, 2015).   

There are 3 most significant barriers to women leadership that were highlighted in the report, they are; lack of role models, sociocultural barriers to gender stereotype and women’s and men’s assigned social and reproductive roles (She Works Report, 2015).  Mentoring-ship, coaching and training program can be one of the best approaches to deal with those issues. Promoting female role model in the workplace might be efficient to improve leadership skills amongst female employees.

 

Recruitment & Retention of Female in the Workforce

The gender stereotype in the community that women should take note STEM subjects might lead to the limited female who graduates who interested to take their career in the mining and energy sector. The perception of women should do the office works and men should do the field works still continue going around amongst the society. They tend to lead the opinion that those roles are divided based on gender and it also limits the opportunity of female to get higher skills at the same time.

Gender equity is not only a women’s issue and is fundamentally an economic issue, therefore man should be involved not only because they hold an important role in the companies but also because man can contribute to a better implementation of gender equality. There are several aspects that might be contributing to difficulties in retaining women within an organization, include better recruitment policy and benefit, provide parenting program, day child care or leave to taken care their elderly parents.

Effort to narrow the gap of abovementioned issues, WiME (Women in Mining and Energy) aims to initiate a partnership with companies, government and other relevant stakeholders through education and knowledge management to benefit advocacy effort on gender in mining and energy sector WIME strategy – acting as an activator, a catalyst, and piggybacking existing network.

This year WiME proudly support Coaltrans Asia as the prestigious coal mining exhibition in Indonesia which will be held in Bali from 23-25 June 2019. Women in Coal Breakfast as one of the new agenda in 2019 will be a good place to start the discussion about how we can contribute to achieve gender equality in the sector and it is one of the best place to start our network to collaborate in the near future. It is expected that many people from all over the place come and join in the event especially for the top women in the coal industry and women that new to coal would also are encouraged to join to give support and inspired others. As the Executive Director of WiME, I am pleased to meet you there and share our thoughts.

 

Want to hear more about it? Join us at Coaltrans Asia 2019. There's still time to book your place!