Men and women will not be equally represented at the top of corporate Australia until early next century if the current rate of change continues, outgoing Fortescue chief executive Elizabeth Gaines told a mining conference on Tuesday.

Gaines, who will step down this month from managing the Andrew Forrest-chaired iron ore miner and green energy aspirant, said when she became CEO in 2018, female chief executives of ASX-listed companies were outnumbered by those named John or David.

“While women are progressing into management roles at a faster rate than men, we are still some 80 years away from seeing an equal share of women in the position of CEO,” she said.

“Unfortunately, the reality is that we are still having the same conversations about equality that we had 30, 20 and 10 years ago,” Gaines told the Diggers and Dealers conference in Kalgoorlie, an event that has brought the male-dominated mining industry bad press in the past due to scantily dressed “skimpy” barmaids at evening functions.

Gaines said change had been hard fought and slow, noting only five of the 71 speakers at the conference were women. She was proud, she said, that Fortescue was one of just a few large listed Australian companies with gender equality at board level.

“We cannot be complacent and assume that diversity is going to happen by accident,” Gaines said.

Half the employees at Fortescue’s operations centre in Perth are women.

Gaines, who will continue with Fortescue as a non-executive director, also urged corporate Australia to move more quickly away from climate-damaging fossil fuels.

During Gaines’ tenure, Fortescue chair and principal shareholder Andrew Forrest pivoted it from a pure iron ore mining play by chasing the production of hydrogen from renewable electricity. The company aims to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030. The clean fuel now has negligible global supply or demand but is likely to be key to decarbonising heavy industry and shipping.