Women Miners in Developing Countries ― Pit Women and Others

Contrary to their masculine portrayal, mines have always employed women in valuable and productive roles. Yet, pit life continues to be represented as a masculine world of work, legitimizing men as the only mineworkers and large, mechanized, and capitalized operations as the only form of mining. Bringing together a range of case studies of women miners from past and present in Asia, the Pacific region, Latin America and Africa, this book makes visible the roles and contributions of women as miners. It also highlights the importance of engendering small and informal mining in the developing world as compared to the early European and American mines. The book shows that women are engaged in various kinds of mining and illustrates how gender and inequality are constructed and sustained in the mines, and also how ethnic identities intersect with those gendered identities.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a Research Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University, Australia. She has researched gender and mining since 1993 in the eastern Indian collieries and in the small quarries in India and elsewhere in South Asia. Since 2004, she has also worked on the gender concerns in the mining industry of Indonesia. Kuntala has been active in the recent initiatives taken up by both the non-governmental organizations and international agencies operating at different levels on the mainstreaming of gender issues in mining. Martha Macintyre is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at The University of Melbourne, Australia. She has held research positions at Monash University and the Australian National University, and taught in Anthropology and Women's Studies at La Trobe University. Over the last twenty-five year's research in Papua New Guinea Martha has published numerous articles on women and gender. She has been monitoring the social and economic impacts of the Lihir goldmine since 1995.