Mining companies, long laggards in appointing women to their boards, are starting to catch up under pressure from corporate governance groups and activist shareholders.

The latest is Glencore, the Swiss commodity trader, which on June 26 appointed mining executive Patrice Merrin. Prior to Merrrin’s arrival, Glencore was the last company left on the UK’s FTSE 100 Index with an all-male board. At the start of last year, five of the seven corporations on the UK’s FTSE-100 Index without women board members were mining companies. Now all five have at least one woman director.

“If a board has open spots and open-minded men, finding outstanding women is the easy part,” says Beth Stewart, a former Goldman Sachs Group investment banker and founder of executive search company Trewstar Corporate Board Services, which focuses on placing women directors.

Merrin’s appointment to the board of Glencore and her public endorsement of a goal of appointing women to a third of all board seats is a milestone for the $80-billion company, which is run by billionaire Ivan Glasenberg, and may open opportunities for more women directors.

Glasenberg’s company had been a lightening rod for criticism from activists, shareholders and UK business secretary Vince Cable for its all-male board. The appointment of the 65-year-old Canadian last month enabled Glencore to at last shed its status as the only company on the UK’s FTSE 100 Index lacking a female director.

Studies increasingly show that having women on boards is good not only for a company’s image, but also for business. Mixed boards contribute to stronger financial performance, according to a 2012 report by Credit Suisse Group. In the previous six years, companies with a market value of more than $10-billion, with at least one woman on the board, outperformed those with all-male boards in terms of share-price performance, the report says. Mixed boards also had a higher return on equity, the report shows. Finding qualified women board members for mining companies should be no different to any other industry, says Stewart. Since 2013, Trewstar has placed 15 women on corporate boards and recently placed a female director on the board of Mosaic, the largest US producer of phosphate fertiliser.

When Mosaic chairperson Bob Lumpkins first approached Stewart about finding a woman board member, he was sceptical she could find one suitable for what he called a “dirty-fingernails business”, she says. “Within a month, we had ten candidates for him. He interviewed three, all of whom would have done well.” Eventually, the board chose 47-year-old Denise Johnson, VP of the integrated manufacturing operations division at Caterpillar. She is now one of two women on the board of Mosaic.

Merrin, who joins former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and former BP CEO Tony Hayward on Glencore’s board, brings more than a strong voice on women’s representation to the table. Those who know her point to decades of experience as an executive at mining, energy and healthcare companies, and a reputation for an unyielding stance on corporate governance.

Merrin “understands the inherent cyclicality of the mining business and she is incredibly attentive to the importance of the social licence to operate”, says Margot Naudie, a Toronto-based portfolio manager, who has known Merrin for more than a decade and who helps oversee about $2.8- billion at Marret Asset Management. “This is a very astute appointment.”

And it likely will not be the last.“I suspect they will be following it up with a second announcement before the year is out,” says Helena Morrissey, founder of the 30% Club, named after its target for female representation on FTSE 100 boards by the end of 2015. “I hope that they are widening the net to include people who perhaps don’t have direct mining experience.”

Peter Grauer, chairperson of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is a nonexecutive director of Glencore. He also is the founding US chairperson of the 30% Club, which started in 2010 in the UK.

Born in Toronto and raised in Fort Erie, near Niagara Falls, Merrin began her career in the mid-1970s, working for Marc Lalonde, Canada’s Minister for the Status of Women. Lalonde later become Canada’s Finance Minister.

More recently, she was chairperson of CML Healthcare, an Ontario-based diagnostic services provider. In that role, she shepherded through last year’s C$1.2-billion ($1.1-billion) takeover by Lifelabs Medical Laboratory Services.
Merrin became a director of Stillwater Mining in May last year, one of four nominees of activist investor Clinton Group, as shareholders intensified a contest for control of the palladium producer’s board.

“She’s very, very strong on the corporate governance side of things and the market-facing aspects,” says Mick McMullen, CEO of Stillwater Mining. “There are some big names on that board and working within the confines of that will be an interesting challenge, or an opportunity.”