Endeavour Silver | Q: Gender diversity in business has recently become a hot topic. Mining is historically a male dominated industry. What are you doing to attract more women to Endeavour?

Q: Gender diversity in business has recently become a hot topic. Mining is historically a male dominated industry. What are you doing to attract more women to Endeavour?

We recognize the benefits arising from diversity in our workforce, including gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. By embracing diversity, we broaden our skill sets and experience, and access different outlooks and perspectives, which ultimately should result in better outcomes for our stakeholders. We have been successful at this because we recruit, retain, reward and develop our people based upon their abilities and contributions. Despite the paucity of female professionals and tradespeople in the mining sector, we have been able to attract qualified women to certain positions.

For example, when we bought the Bolañitos mine in 2007, the mining sector was suffering from a serious skills shortage and hiring geologists was extremely competitive. We posted some job openings in Guanajuato and were fortunate to attract some female Mexican geologists as applicants. Although they were short on experience, our VP Exploration provided them with on the job training and they turned out to be very productive employees, smart, diligent and hard working. A couple of them have been promoted on merit and now manage our exploration groups in Guanajuato.

Another example of our desire to diversify is our mining skills training schools. Like the professions, there is a lack of skilled mining equipment operators in our sector, so Endeavour launched its mining schools in order to provide the young or unemployed in Mexico with career skills that will last a lifetime. Since 2009, we have trained over 100 students including dozens of women in such skills as truck driving, scoop tramming and jumbo drilling.

While we do not support the adoption of quotas to support our diversity policy, we recruit and employ people based on their qualifications, abilities and contributions. We are committed to fostering a diverse workplace environment where individual differences and opinions are heard and respected and employment opportunities are based on the qualifications required for a particular position at a particular time, including training, experience, performance, skill and merit.

You will find our diversity policy on the website here.

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Q: Gender diversity in business has recently become a hot topic. Mining is historically a male dominated industry. What are you doing to attract more women to Endeavour?