Speaking to Energy News regarding his participation in APPEA 2017's diversity panel in Perth last week, Bennett said increasing the diversity of the candidate pool would help placate fears of reverse discrimination.
Bennett, whose company's workforce comprises of just 17% women, wants to work more pro-actively with universities to come up with a more diverse range of candidates for positions within the company - and not just regarding gender but those from indigenous and ethnic backgrounds.
While BHP set a gender balance target of 50% by 2025, Clough is too early in that journey to figure out what the target will be.
Bennett said that while Clough is yet to set a gender target, for now the company can help ensure it has the right candidates for recruitments for a new role, and a diverse pool from which to choose.
"Then you really can choose the best person for the role," he said.
Both Bennett and fellow panellist Michael Schoch, Shell Australia general manager of the Crux project, said the oil and gas industry could transform its gender "problem" with the same executive-led approach that safety was overhauled.
Speaking to Energy News, Bennett fleshed out exactly what that would look like, and based on that experience, quotas, however controversial, would have to come in at some point.
"We have behaviour-based safety programs and observation cards; and it's always the debate: Do you set a target minimum level of doing one observation every 10 working hours, do you want 100 observations each week or 10 good ones?" he pondered.
"That debate is quite a strong one. I believe you're going to have to set those minimum targets because you've got to ensure the programs are being used.
"Human nature is such that if you don't have a target and just expect that people will do it, ultimately it will get lower and lower on their priorities and ultimately you wind up with programs that have very sporadic participation.
"That's been proven to be the case in the safety industry. If you don't mandate [participation] in programs, then they do start to lose their impact.
"When do we get to the sort of diversity profile that we think is acceptable? I honestly couldn't tell you. I suspect it's some time away, but it'll never improve unless we start to do something about it now."
He acknowledged that there were strong arguments - some presented to Energy News on the floor of APPEA 2017 by veteran oil and gas workers about the risk of reverse discrimination, but that may be avoided by working more proactively with universities.
Clough works with universities to take on interns, undertakes graduate recruitment and provides some scholarships for undergraduates and sponsors an MBA student each year.
"Universities put together a range of candidates; we go through our interview and selection process then award the scholarships," he said.
"Last time we got the candidates list they were pretty much all white Anglo-Saxon males. So there's something wrong.
"We need a diverse range of candidates from universities to be able to have diversity in our business, and the fact that they weren't able to find the candidates to have a bit more diversity than that is very telling."
The answer to that lies partly in the way companies approach and frame the opportunities they're offering to people, and partly the perception that large chunks of the community has about the industry.
Bennett said, the oil and gas industry - and certainly the construction sector in which Clough resides - needed a "reality check" around the obligation, and work smarter about making the sector more broadly accepted as a good career opportunity for people.
"I don't think that's unachievable at all," he said.
Taking the example of STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] programs in schools where, in the case of his own daughter's school, they undertake real-world problem solving in the engineering space and program robots, Bennett said there were plenty of correlation to the construction sector.
