BHP could’ve made corporate history. Sadly for women, it didn’t

There were two women in the running to take Australia’s most prestigious corporate job of leading our homegrown global mining giant, BHP. For months it looked like we were about to see history in the making.

But when the board announced its big management reveal on Wednesday, both had missed out.

Even though one of females, Geraldine Slattery, who is head of BHP in Australia, was considered the odds-on favourite to get the chief executive nod, neither she nor the other female contender, chief financial officer Vandita Pant, wore a hard hat strong enough to break the glass ceiling.

BHP’s board instead went with an outside bet – a bloke it considered as an up-and-coming star inside the company, Brandon Craig – to replace the departing chief executive Mike Henry.

As with any seismic shift inside an executive management C suite, there will likely be fallout. Missing out on the top job could threaten Slattery’s loyalty to the Big Australian.

Over the past few weeks she was also a mooted contender for the top job at energy giant Woodside. In the end she didn’t make the cut at either company, with Woodside announcing on Wednesday that Liz Westcott got that gig.

You can almost hear the collective sigh of disappointment among the next generation of female executive aspirants.

None of this suggests Craig was not a worthy winner in what BHP’s chairman Ross McEwan described as a tight succession race.

Craig has a stellar track record, having run BHP’s iron ore operations in the past – which until this year was the company’s biggest earner. And he has more recently overseen its American operations, whose assets are loaded with the company’s now-crucial commodity of copper and the future-facing and emerging potash business.

The board was particularly impressed by Craig’s operational bona fides – his ability to claw productivity gains from existing operations, eking out improved production at the Escondida copper mine and doing deals with stakeholders like regional governments in Canada to improve the transportation of potash.

One of his first tasks will be to head to China to deal with the six-months-long stand-off with China’s state-backed Mineral Resources Group, which has been banning some of BHP’s iron ore product as part of a dispute over pricing contracts.

That said, BHP has passed up the opportunity to make a historical mark by anointing the first woman to head the company in 140 years.

Setting this cultural tone must be important for a company that has worked hard on gender equality, even at the grassroots level by increasing the number of women on work sites and improving their prospects for promotion.

It would’ve sent a strong and important message, well beyond having equal representation at board level.

Coles and Woolworths both broke with decades-long tradition in recent years by placing women at the helm of their companies. Meanwhile, our four major banks are all led by men (although Westpac had previously been run at one time by Gail Kelly).

But the male-dominated mining industry has a less stellar history of female leaders among its global players, one of the few being Cynthia Carroll, who ran Anglo American for five years.

Last year Rio Tinto appointed Simon Trott as its new chief executive from an all-male list of contenders. Most of the senior leadership team inside Rio are men – other than its heads of human resources and legal. At the operational level, Katie Jackson runs the copper division.

While most investors are not particularly concerned about chief executive genders, the message carried by BHP placing a woman at the top would have been culturally loud and clear.

With Slattery having been such a hot bet to get the job, you can almost hear the collective sigh of disappointment among the next generation of female executive aspirants.

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