18% of employees at Sherritt’s divisions and joint ventures are women, and we are committed to doubling this total by 2030
Diversity is an emerging issue across society, and is particularly relevant to the natural resources sector given the historically low proportion of women and people of differing backgrounds and abilities in our industry. We know that we will become a stronger, more innovative and resilient company as we continue to attract a spectrum of people of different cultural backgrounds, genders, ages and life experience to our company.
We have begun a multi-year effort to increase our understanding of related challenges and opportunities, improve diversity literacy internally, align business processes and structures to be more inclusive, develop and implement a metrics framework, and ultimately improve performance in this area.
In 2019, Sherritt launched an internal global framework for diversity and inclusion (D&I), which includes site-level plans for the next five years. Although the initial focus of our D&I strategy was gender, the recent events with respect to racism have highlighted the need for us to re-evaluate our strategy to ensure we are acknowledging and addressing any systemic issues that impede our desire to be an inclusive and respectful workplace. In addition, Sherritt announced that we will target doubling the percentage of women in our organization from 18% to 36% over the next 10 years.