Women hold just 12% of chief executive and head-of-business positions in Australia’s mining industry despite accounting for 23% of its workforce, exposing a leadership gap that new research suggests could be limiting companies’ ability to retain talent and improve business performance.
The Gender Equity Insights 2026: Unlocking Australia’s Workforce Potential report, produced by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC) and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), found that women occupied 24% of mining management positions in 2024-25. They also held 25% of senior management roles, indicating that their representation drops sharply at the highest executive levels.
“Promotion rates tell us who is taking the next step. We also need to understand who keeps progressing through successive leadership tiers – and who stays,” BCEC director and report co-author Alan Duncan said.
The findings highlight a challenge for mining employers seeking to build more diverse leadership teams. While women are advancing through management at higher rates than men, their relatively low representation in the industry’s top positions raises questions about succession planning, career development and the barriers preventing experienced employees from reaching executive roles.
The research, based on reports from 8,239 Australian employers covering 5.44 million workers, found that women in mining moved from non-management into management at a rate of 0.7%, compared with 0.5% for men in 2024-25.
Female mining managers also enjoyed a 2.3-percentage-point promotion advantage over their male counterparts, suggesting that advancement rates alone do not explain the industry’s leadership imbalance.
Mining’s pay divide
The report identifies mining as a significant contributor to Australia’s gender remuneration gap, reflecting both the concentration of men in the industry and differences in earnings between female and male employees.
Researchers estimated that gender concentration in mining contributed approximately A$2,950 to the national total remuneration gap, while salary differences within the industry added another A$875. The figures represent modelled contributions to the national gap rather than individual mining workers’ pay differences.
Western Australia, the country’s major mining jurisdiction, recorded a full-time total remuneration gender pay gap of 28.8% in 2024-25, down from 32.1% in 2020-21 but still considerably higher than the national average of 21%.
The state-level figures cover all industries, rather than mining alone, but underline the broader pay inequality facing employers in a resource-rich economy.
The study also linked greater female representation in corporate leadership with stronger financial outcomes among ASX-listed companies.
Companies in the highest quartile of women’s board representation ranked among the strongest business performers in 28% of company-years, compared with 18% for those in the lowest quartile.
The researchers also associated the appointment of a female CEO or head of business with approximately A$119 million in additional market value for a company with median assets.
Those findings cover listed companies across multiple industries and establish associations rather than proving that appointing women directly improves financial performance.
Nevertheless, they provide a potential commercial incentive for mining companies to examine whether their leadership structures are making full use of available talent.
Flexibility barriers
The report identifies limited access to flexible management positions as another obstacle to retaining experienced women, particularly as employees take on caring responsibilities.
More than 90% of Australian organizations offered flexible start and finish times in 2024-25, while 86.3% provided part-time work. Yet only 13.2% had designed management roles that could be performed part-time.
“Offering part-time work is very different from designing senior jobs that can actually be done part-time,” BCEC senior research fellow and report co-author Silvia Salazar said.
The research found that female managers across Australian industries resigned at a rate of 13.8%, compared with 12% for men, potentially undermining gains achieved through recruitment and promotion. The report does not provide a separate mining resignation rate.
Only 11% of employers had targets to increase men’s use of parental leave, highlighting the uneven distribution of caring responsibilities that can interrupt career progression.
“If flexibility disappears as people move up the organization, employers risk narrowing their leadership pipeline just as experienced workers are ready to progress,” Salazar said.
The report outlines 12 recommendations for employers, including monitoring recruitment and promotion outcomes, addressing remuneration disparities and creating clearer pathways into senior operational and financial positions.
It also calls for companies to consider part-time or job-sharing arrangements when designing management vacancies and to assess whether flexible work affects employees’ promotion prospects.
For mining companies, where women remain underrepresented in technical and operational roles, those recommendations raise a broader question about how future executives are identified and developed.
Women account for 32% of mining professionals but only 11% of technicians and trades workers, according to the report, illustrating the uneven distribution of female talent across the industry’s occupational groups.
WGEA CEO Christine Castley said employers needed to look beyond recruitment and examine where workers were being lost along their career paths.
“Good workforce data can show employers where talent is progressing, where it is being lost and where they may be overlooking capability they already have,” Castley said.