Winning Women: Up mountains, down mines

When Jeannette McGill works with scanners and Xboxes in her downtown Johannesburg office to develop machines that will, in the long term, take the place of mine workers, she knows better than most what it is like to be in the bowels of the earth.

She has often descended 3km underground, in a cage crammed with men, to show them where the reef horizon is and the best place to mine it.

As a geologist, she’s worked alongside strata control engineers and safety officers, discussing structural integrity and environmental safety.

“I was fortunate that, early on in my career, I could contribute, technologically, to a brand-new gold mine, as well as to an old one with conventional stoping that had been working since the 1940s,” says McGill.

Target Mine in the Free State was South Africa’s first mechanised mine, “and I was really privileged to have that exposure so early on in my career”.

That was in 1996, a year before women could legally work underground, “as we had either to be medical staff tending to an accident or, as geologists, marking off the rock face with a spray can – a bit like underground graffiti, except it was intersecting red lines. We couldn’t spend a complete shift underground.”

McGill became only the second woman in the Free State to be issued with an underground blasting certificate. She worked double shifts for a few years to gain the exposure and experience she needed to sit for her certificate.

“I didn’t need to have it; I chose to do it,” she explains in her firm, measured manner.

She is tall. “It’s an advantage to be able to look men in the eye.” But that didn’t help on her first shift below ground, as mine management hadn’t warned crews about her presence.

“They all ran from the mining area, in effect going on strike, because it was culturally insensitive to have women there.”

It’s McGill’s multifaceted experience that provides her with the added insight to manage change and technological innovation for Anglo American Platinum (Amplats). She’s done far more than help to pioneer 3-D geological modelling, something she did at AngloGold with a colleague, Benford Mokoatle. She’s able, with the sensitivity born of a common experience, to put herself into mine workers’ boots as she helps plot a safer future – without people – underground.

“It’s not fair to put a timeline on that now, and I need to emphasise the imperative and driving need for mechanisation from a safety perspective.”

She explains that, as managers, “we need to be able to better anticipate change, and how it has an impact on people, processes and technology”.

With her unusually broad experience of mining, she admits she knows the sector better than most. Her exposure extends to having worked with small-scale mining communities in Tanzania, Mali and Ghana.

“In 2002, I was working at the CSIR, where part of our mandate was to leverage regional development through mining,” says McGill.

She always enjoyed the camaraderie of mining crews and, determined to continue with that, she not only learnt French but became “fairly proficient in Swahili”.

McGill did not set out to become a geologist. She did a BSc in chemistry and zoology at the University of Port Elizabeth, the city where she grew up.

Anglovaal executives selected the clever young woman there and, after graduating, she left the sea and mountains she was passionate about to work in Allanridge, Welkom.

“I thought I could always go back to working for SA National Parks, as I had done in my holidays, in the mountains and Tsitsikamma Forest.”

Instead, she found herself working for the CSIR as an adviser. They sent her to the Colorado School of Mines, regarded as the Harvard of mining, to do a PhD in economic geology. She complemented it with two master’s degrees, one in mining engineering and the other in mineral economics.

After five years in the US, where she met mine workers from all over the world, the conscientious graduate returned to the CSIR to give back to her country.

She worked with original equipment manufacturers and was pleased to move back on to the production side of mining. That led to McGill joining Amplats last year, which was at a critical point of rolling out different technologies.

“Working with the teams concerned was really attractive to me.”

When she speaks at Women in Mining conferences around the world, McGill takes pride in pointing out that South Africa has taken half the time, 15 years compared with the 30 of Canada and Australia, to achieve about 26% female representation in the industry.

She relaxes by keeping fit enough to climb mountains. She spent two months last year in Nepal attempting to summit Manaslu, the eighth-highest peak in the world. The risk of avalanches stymied that goal, but the woman whose motto is “deeds, not words” will be back.