Women and gender in the mines challenging masculinity through history an introduction (original) (raw)
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Women in Mining: A Challenge to Occupational Culture in Mines
This study explores how women cope in response to the masculine occupational culture and physical demands of underground work in South African mines. The involvement of women underground in South African mines is a relatively new phenomenon. Increased numbers of women underground miners is the result of targets set by the Mining Charter. Nevertheless, mining companies seem to find it difficult to meet their targets due to a number of challenges related to challenging domains that are historically dominated by men. The research looks specifically at these challenges and the coping strategies employed by women in mining, taking into consideration the masculine mining work culture and the physical demands of the different mining occupations. Working underground is experienced differently by men and women, with men having more experience and having been fully integrated into the occupational culture of mines. Due to this gender difference in the workplace, challenges and coping mechanisms differ among genders. A research strategy of participant observation was used to study this new phenomenon at a platinum mine near Rustenburg. The study draws on labour market theories that link labour supply and demand through the socially embedded processes of labour incorporation, allocation, control and reproduction. These four processes are used to guide a systematic consideration of challenges and coping mechanisms of women mineworkers in each stage of the processes related to change in the labour market.
2015
From the introduction: In May 2013, the Australian-South African International Mining for Development Centre (IM4DC) organized an African Women in Mining and Development study tour. This initiative was not the first nor the only one of its kind, and the past decade witnessed a growing interest in the role of women in large-scale (LSM) and, especially, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) on the world’s mining hotspots, such as South Africa, Australia, Ghana, or Papua New Guinea. This suggests that international development initiatives only recently noticed the important role women play in mining. The reason for this may be the heroic image of muscled miners armed with headlights and pneumatic drills, covered in sweat and dust, which dominates the Western imagination when it comes to mining (see Lahiri-Dutt, this volume). This image is, no doubt, a recent product. Reforms in nineteenth-century industrializing Europe were geared towards domesticating, in every literal sense, working-class women active in mining and in heavy industry, such as textile mills. Yet, it partly explains why in popular representations and in development initiatives until recently there was no place for female miners, except in their derived capacities as worrying mothers, wives or girlfriends, or as “poor, powerless, and invariably pregnant, burdened with lots of children, or carrying one load or another on her back or head” (Win 2007: 79). This skewed image ...
Ecofeminism and the women in mining movement share common interests in gender and the environment. Ecofeminists have, however, ignored the experiences of women who work in mining. Equally, the women in mining movement has failed to draw on ecofeminist ideas to help explore what it means to be a woman who mines. This has resulted in a missed opportunity to investigate further how cultural understandings of gender affect humanity’s relationship with the environment, and vice versa. This thesis explores what a relationship between ecofeminism and the women in mining movement could offer to each side in the relationship and to the broader debate about gender in mining. It argues that ecofeminism is useful in helping to challenge the singular construction of “woman” that exists within the discourse of women in mining; and that ecofeminism could also expand its knowledge of how women experience the environment by paying attention to the stories of women who mine it. The two are, however, seemingly impossible bedfellows. The body of the “woman” in the discourse of women in mining challenges the ecofeminist insistence that the female body is the victim of masculine engagement with the environment. Ecofeminist ideas about gender also threaten the stability of the subject of concern to the women in mining movement—the “woman”. Mining exists today as a particularly powerful and influential human practice; and it is far from a peaceful practice. Conflicts exist over who owns mineable resources, the worth of bodies that mine them, and the impacts of mining on the stability of the earth and its inhabitants. It is through exploring the relationship between gender and mining that we are able to realise the extent to which an insistence on sustaining dominant understandings of gender in and for mining are denying the possibility of more peaceful practices of gender and how we, as gendered humans, utilise the earth’s natural yet un-renewable resources.
Can new technology challenge macho-masculinities? The case of the mining industry
Mineral Economics
The aim with this article is to discuss how changes in technology at workplaces engender both change and restoration of gender constructions within the context of underground mining. The discussions are formed around a constructed case based on material from gender and organizational studies of large-scale industrial mines in different countries, most of them from Sweden. New technologies such as digitalization and automation together with new organizational forms engender changes in mining work, e.g., new types of work tasks, new competence demands, and a move from underground to high-tech control rooms aboveground. One main observation is that the changes challenge the old and recalcitrant blue-collar mining masculinity. On the one hand, the organizational resistance and “lagging” seemed to result in re-gendering and restoration of the male dominance. On the other hand, there were tendencies to adaptation in the workplace cultures, including new ways of forming mining masculinitie...
'There was some hard times in there': women in the Queensland coal mines
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The first handful of women began working in Queensland coal mines in 1979, as labourers, in what was seen by some as a public relations exercise rather than a genuine willingness to embrace equal opportunity. Our paper reports on the changing situation of women miners since this period, based on interviews of 22 of these women mining workers recorded between 2006 and 2009.
Women Miners:'we're in like a virus and we don't mind the work either'
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