In a sector that employs up to 20 million people, women and children comprise around 20% of artisanal and small-scale gold miners (ASGM). While women are active in the ASGM workforce, they also typically face a range of gender-specific barriers that prevent their full participation: In addition to their work at the mines, women still largely take on traditional unpaid labor such as managing
household chores and childcare. These extra duties affect their availability to spend time earning a livelihood, reducing their income levels compared to men. Women miners lack necessary equipment and tools to protect them from mercury contact and other hazards and sometimes must borrow PPE from their male co-workers. Women are more vulnerable to gender-based violence in the mining workplace.
Traditional social attitudes and customs, including limits on property ownership, reduce women’s access to finance to support their mining operations. Women are frequently excluded from government structures and processes that determine mining policy and allow for formal recognition of mining activities. Societal perceptions overall often reflect a lack of respect and recognition for the rights of women miners.
The empowerment of women and girls concerns their gaining power and control over their own lives. It involves awareness-raising, building self-confidence, expansion of choices, increased access to and control over resources, and actions to transform the structures and institutions that reinforce and perpetuate gender discrimination and inequality. This implies that to be empowered they must not only have equal capabilities (such as education and health) and equal access to resources and opportunities (such as land and employment), but they must also have the agency to use these rights, capabilities, resources, and opportunities to make strategic choices and decisions (such as is provided through leadership opportunities and participation in political institutions).
In addition, UNESCO explains, “No one can empower another: only the individual can empower herself or himself to make choices or to speak out. However, institutions including international cooperation agencies can support processes that can nurture self-empowerment of individuals or groups”.
Inputs to promote the empowerment of women should facilitate women’s articulation of their needs and priorities and a more active role in promoting these interests and needs. Empowerment of women cannot be achieved in a vacuum; men must be brought along in the process of change. Empowerment should not be seen as a zero-sum game where gains for women automatically imply losses for men. In empowerment strategies, increasing women’s power does not refer to “power over” or controlling forms of power, but instead to alternative forms of power—“power to,” “power with,” and “power from within”—that emphasize the use of individual and collective strengths to achieve common goals without coercion or domination.
Gender (or sexual) division of labor: This is an important concept in basic gender analysis that helps deepen understanding about social relations as an entry point to sustainable change through development. The division of labor refers to the way each society divides work among men and women, boys and girls, according to socially established gender roles or what is considered suitable and valuable for each sex. Within the division of labor, there are several types of roles:
Productive roles: Activities carried out by men and women in order to produce goods and services either for sale, exchange, or to meet the subsistence needs of the family.
Reproductive roles: Activities needed to ensure the reproduction of society’s labor force. This includes housework like cleaning, cooking, childbearing, rearing, and caring for family members. These tasks are done mostly by women.
Community managing role: Activities undertaken primarily by women at the community level, as an extension of their reproductive role, to ensure the provision and maintenance of scarce resources of collective consumption such as water, health care, and education. This is voluntary unpaid work performed during “free” time.
Community politics role: Activities undertaken primarily by men at the community level, often within the framework of national politics. This officially recognized leadership role may be paid directly or result in increased power or status.
Triple role: This refers to the fact that women tend to work longer and more fragmented days than men as they are usually involved in three different roles: reproductive, productive, and community work.