Women in the workplace

AngloGold Ashanti is firmly committed to supporting the achievement of equality between women and men across all levels of our organisation. To this end, the Board has approved a policy on the promotion of gender diversity, and the company’s succession planning processes specifically support the advancement of women.

Achieving gender equality

Women are provided with opportunities to advance their careers through secondments, mentorship programmes, middle management to executive development programmes, courses through local and international educational institutions, and participation on external boards outside of AngloGold Ashanti.

The human resources management team reports to the Social Ethics and Sustainability subcommittee on the representation of women at every level, and has set targets beyond what is legislated in our areas of operation. A number of initiatives are in place to ensure that these targets are met.

As at August 2020, AngloGold Ashanti’s global gender split was 87% male and 13% female. Our board representation is 44% female and our Executive Committee is 33% female.

Gender split:
workforce (%)
Gender split:
Board (%)
Gender split:
executive (%)

Bloomberg Gender Equity Index

AngloGold Ashanti is proud to be included in the 2021 Bloomberg Gender Equity Index (GEI), which assesses companies based on several metrics. These include whether women are likely to remain employed at companies following parental leave, the availability of on-site lactation rooms, and the sponsorship of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education programmes for women.

AngloGold Ashanti is one of 325 companies headquartered across 42 countries and regions included in the index. This lays a strong foundation for us to improve our efforts towards promoting gender equity in particular, and diversity and inclusion more broadly.

Addressing prevailing challenges

We are aware, however, that we operate in an industry that has been historically dominated by men, and that this industry often exists within larger patriarchal structures in society. We have a responsibility to play our part in addressing it in our business, our industry and our communities.

We have conducted  assessments across our operations to learn more about some of the key issues that our female employees face. Some high-level themes include:

  • Bias against women of child-bearing age prevents development opportunities
  • Women feel marginalised and sidelined in male-dominated working environments
  • There is a lack of female role models and internal mentorship
  • There are very few or no women in managerial or leadership roles, particularly at site level
  • There is often a lack of recognition of women’s professional contribution
  • Workplace harassment exists

To address these issues, we have implemented a number of important initiatives. These include launching the Global Women’s Forum at our corporate office and Regional Women’s Forums at each site, revising the Future Leaders Mentorship Programme to offer mentorship to women, specifically targeting women for vacant managerial and leadership positions, and rolling out unconscious bias training globally.

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