Women's Day 2023: With less than 8% women, core sectors have workforce diversity issue

For core sectors – steel, cement, coal and oil – combating carbon emissions is not the only environmental, social and governance (ESG) issue. Gender diversity indicators for the leading companies in these sectors are remarkably lacking.

The representation of women in the total workforce of the top producers of steel, cement, coal and oil in India ranged from 3.9 percent to 7.8 percent, according to company disclosures for FY2022. This was significantly lower than the India average. According to the World Bank, women comprised 23 percent of the total labour force in India in 2021.

Where are women employees?

At JSW Steel, India’s top integrated steel producer, women constituted 5.3 percent (666 women employees) of the total workforce.

For UltraTech Cement, India’s largest cement manufacturer, the representation of women was 3.9 percent (796 women employees) of its total workforce.

Coal India, the country’s largest coal miner, employed 19,548 women, accounting for only 7.8 percent of more than 248,000 employees.

Women’s representation at the country’s largest oil producer, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, was 7.5 percent, or 2,044 women employees, in a workforce of more than 27,000.

Gender diversity data for the four companies was sourced from their FY22 annual reports.

These four companies – market leaders in their respective business segments – employed more than 300,000 people in FY22. Of this, less than 8 percent, or 23,054, were women.

Ajanta Chatterjee, Senior Vice President -HR for JSW group said JSW Steel is in the process of increasing the share of women employees to 10 percent over the next few years. “JSW Steel has increased women employees over the last few years and women engineers at shop floors and some manufacturing lines are fully run by women,” Chatterjee said in response to an email query.

Chatterjee added, “At the company’s Vasind and Vijayanagar plants, we have entire production lines managed by all women’s team and we want to take this further down at all our plant locations.”

Biases and patriarchy

According to Saundarya Rajesh, founder of Avtar group, an organisation that seeks to make workplaces more inclusive, companies are able to hire women in corporate roles but not on the shopfloor.

Far-off plant locations, heavy machinery and shift timings are some of the challenges faced in hiring more women on the shopfloors in these sectors. Biases are also at play.

“While organisations are opening up to hiring women, there are deep-rooted biases and patriarchal stereotypes in hiring women in these industries, hindering the path towards a gender-diverse workforce at shopfloors,” Rajesh said. “The challenge begins at the hiring stage. To give you an example, at one of the companies, we recommended more than 50 diversity profiles out of the total 70 profiles for plant positions. However, there is a stiff difficulty in pushing diversity profiles given the rigid mindsets,” she said.

Behind global peers

India’s top producers are significantly behind global peers operating in similar businesses.

For bp, one of the world’s largest oil companies, 39 percent of the global workforce were women, as of 2021.

For mining giant Glencore, 13 percent of the workforce were women as of 2021.

At ArcelorMittal, the world’s leading steelmaker, the share of women in the workforce was 17 percent in 2021.

Cement manufacturer Holcim had 17 percent women in its workforce in 2022.

All gender diversity data for the global companies was sourced from their annual disclosures.

Building material sectors such as steel and cement and energy sectors such as coal and oil are already under pressure for ESG performance due to carbon-intensive manufacturing and extraction processes. Poor gender diversity further contributes to lower social scores in the ESG rankings.

S&P Global noted in a report in June 2020 that metals and mining have historically been difficult industries for women to break into, and female pioneers in the industry have had to surmount prejudice as well as legal and cultural barriers to advance their careers.

Sixty economies have at least one restriction on women working in mining, according to a 2020 World Bank report, S&P said.

Two years later, there has not been much change, at least not in the Indian context. As of July 2022, only five women were employed in underground coal mines – one in Jharkhand and four in Telangana, according to a Coal Ministry reply to the Rajya Sabha. This data is not exhaustive and does not reflect information on women working in captive mines of private companies. For instance, JSW Steel said it has 47 women employees at its mining locations, managing heavy earth moving machinery and many  operating cranes at multiple plant locations.