For years now, the mining industry has been calling for change in the way it recruits its workforce, with an emphasis on bringing more women into the fold.
“If we're looking at the pipeline, the pipeline's not even there; we don't even have apprentices in the pipeline to get women into all the companies," she said. According to the Mining Industry Human Resources Council, Canada will need to hire roughly 80,000 workers between 2020 and 2030 to meet that demand, and women will play an important role in filling that gap.
That didn’t change until 1978, she noted. And so, in the aftermath, Falconbridge and other mining companies had to scramble to catch up in bringing more women into the industry.