Divya Ramesh

MNE 697: The Emerging International Framework for Development of Mineral Resources
November 28, 2020

A Topic of Scholarship: Employment and Undercount of Women in Mining

Women have always been employed and undercounted within an industry that has seen the male miner as
the ‘natural’ worker (Lahiri-Dutt, 2020). While surveys of historical documents hold echoes of a female presence in
the pre-industrial mines of the Americas and Sweden in their descriptions of worker attire and allusions to family
obligations and leave, official records of workers hold no counts of these women (Tallichet, 2006). Rudimentary
documentation emerges to show that women did work in early industrial mines where Europeans hired them
selectively, often for shallow pit mining and during times when other employees were scarce (Alexander, 2007).
John (2013) notes how women in the minerals industry were recruited by male relatives, working unacknowledged
in the early coal mines of England as “pit‐brow lasses” who surveyed the mine surface. Until about 1842, women
did work underground globally, but in the wake of an accident in the Huskar Colliery that killed children, Queen
Victoria passed the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 that banned women and girls, and boys under 10, from
underground work (1842 Act; Huskar Pit Disaster). While some women may have moved to surface work in the
wake of this restriction, it is likely that others could not find replacement paid employment and so returned to
sustaining the family unit as “caretaker”—a necessary work that, while routinely afforded to women, is
unrepresented in minerals industry labor counts (Hall, 2004; Lo, 2002).
In another hemisphere, collieries of the early 1900s in India employed women as underground “living
labor,” via their family units (Alexander, 2007; Lahiri-Dutt, 2012a; Lahiri-Dutt, 2012b), but this practice may have
systematically lowered women’s chances at individual recognition for their work (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015). Years after
European precedent, female underground labor was also stopped in Asia, via protective legislation stemming from
the ILO Convention of 1919 on unsanitary mining conditions. This action reduced the count of female workers in
the minerals industry by moving them into undocumented, often unregulated, surface work in transportation
(Johansson & Ringblom, 2017). While women are much more represented in the panning and sorting tasks crucial to
artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) (Buss et. al., 2020), the reduced respect inherent to this style of mining has
marked the women who work within the subdiscipline with the same: so shaping the official employment records
that are compiled with the bias of male surveyors to under-report women's participation in the minerals industry
(McCulloch, 2003; Forestell, 2006). Reprisal in recent years has sought to make women more visible and counted in
the industry through a historical memory approach that captures the stories of female mineworkers through oral
narrative (Aiken, 1999; Gier & Mercier, 2006; Tallichet, 2006; Murray & Peetz 2010). These anthropological and
ethnographical approaches have successfully lifted discussions of gender into the realm of scholarship in the
extractions industry that now contemplates the invisibility of women in mining, acknowledging the necessity of
female roles in an ideologically and practically male-dominated space.
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH) may partially explain the exclusion of women from the minerals
industry. With historical roots as far back as Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Essay on the Origin of Language,” the
hypothesis holds that culture, language and thought have interwoven relationships (Lomas, 2018). Very much
preceding Immanuel Kant’s first Critique, Herder was the “first to perceive the relation[ship] between thinking and
speaking,” arguing that differences in national mentalities stemmed from related natural differences in language
(Holquist, 2011; Lomas, 2018). In contemporary times, the language relativity hypothesis has been most thoroughly
delineated by cultural anthropologist and linguist, Edward Sapir (1929), and his student, Benjamin Whorf (1940). In
his discussion, Sapir (1929) notes that “[l]anguage is becoming increasingly valuable as a guide…to
study….culture,” with the “cultural patterns of a civilization…indexed in [its] language.” Sapir (1929) goes as far as
to conclude that it is an “illusion” to think that we can understand “the significant outlines of a culture” without a
guide to that culture’s language and symbolic representation. While the Sapir-Whorf, or linguistic relativity
hypothesis, does not appear outright in literature published about the minerals industry, its guiding principle does:
that our access to language, or lack thereof, outlines our subsequent conceptions of workplace cultures. As previous
evaluations of gender in the extractions industry have taken economic, social justice, and ecological approaches to
describe inequality (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015a; Lahiri-Dutt & Robinson, 2008; Johansson & Ringblom, 2017; DeBoeck et.
al., 1999; Lahiri-Dutt, 2019; Solomon et. al., 2008), a theoretically-rooted linguistic approach to the development of
a culture seems missing. As such, the language relativity hypothesis might fit to describe the extent to which women
are missing from the minerals industry while also holding suggestions for an improved and equitable representation
of genders.

Missing or Inadequate Languages on Gender

Some scholars believe that any language surrounding gender simply fails to exist in the minerals industry
with resulting repercussions on culture. As Lahiri-Dutt (2015a) writes, “conventional economic geographers
[writing about the extractions industry] regarded an analysis of gender an ‘unnecessary overburden,’ or to use a
mining term, “unnecessary material”… [while] political ecologists….omit [it] as immaterial.” In an article
surrounding gender and safety, Laplonge and Albury (2013) address a third lens, the occupational framework, and
note that no “formalized system exists” surrounding gender and mine site fatality. They elaborate that within an
occupational frame, gender is a concern only to “personnel in human resources” who seek to meet token
organizational values around “diversity” while “[m]en engaged in operational work—those who work with large
machinery and in the most dangerous environments on mine sites—are also not expected to have an understanding
of how their behaviours are affected by gender” in a “genderless industry.” As Laplonge and Albury (2013)
conceptualize it, the minerals industry is structured through an “occupational safety” lens that does not include
gender in its calculations of personnel. This purely economic and numerical view seems substantiated by the number
of genderless workplace injury articles that abound in the minerals industry (Nowrouzi-Kia, et.al., 2018); per this
view, “[p]eople studying occupational safety at a tertiary [overarching] level in general are not required to take
courses that will help them understand the connection between risk and gender, let alone basic concepts of gender.
Their ability to bring gender into their work on safety in mining is therefore undermined by the formal education
process” (Laplonge & Albury, 2013). In other words, depending on reference frame, the people in positions of
power within the minerals industry either dismiss gender as immaterial, or have not been taught the language
“concepts” to discuss gender in the industry. Thinking about this deficit through the lens of the linguistic relativity
hypothesis (LRH), it could be that a culture that does not account for gender does so in the mining industry because
of the want of language with which to do it.
The lack of language surrounding gender in the minerals industry further stems from an industry-wide
theoretical framework that is fully economic rather than linguistic-cultural. The business case scenario within the
minerals industry that asymptotes gender equality is inadequate. The primary aim of the business case is to secure
‘competitive advantage,’ and the needs of that competitive advantage can change constantly, making the business
case an unstable solution to the more rooted gender equality problem (Mayes & Pini, 2014; Johansson & Ringblom,
2017). The inadequacy of the business case scenario in mining and minerals can explain the historic cycles in female
employment and subsequent unemployment in the World War II and post-War years, where opportunities for
women waxed as employing women was the economically stable strategy for the company and waned as it was no
longer. This business approach is a ploy of numbers, not language; it provides short-term token solutions to increase
recruitment and representation in the industry while never quite addressing larger, cultural questions of equality. As
the Stage One Report for the Minerals Council of Australia evidences, the consistent recommendation per the
business approach is to focus on “attraction” and “recruitment” into the industry by way of college fairs, advertising,
or consultants. Women are an accidental byproduct, again uncounted, where the focus in overall recruitment is not
necessarily on gender specifically (Lord & Eastham, 2011, 14). In a more recent example of this pattern, Martin
Kaggwa (2020) describes how South Africa employed the business case scenario through legislative action that
“introduced a Mining Charter” and “set up quotas for women [sic] employment and participation in mining,” but
“by 2016, evidence indicated that despite the legislative intervention, the number of women participating in the
mining sector was not increasing.” One part of the reason for this could be that the Mining Charter in South Africa
was never a specific effort that reached out to women. It was advertised as an effort towards increasing numbers in
“black economic empowerment,” a category within which women form only part (Heyns, 2018). Another part of the
reason why women are undercounted in the South African effort could be that while the charter is touted as
“progressive[ly] gender sensitive,” in scholarly discussions surrounding its implementation (Kaggwa, 2020), the
actual text of the charter does not mention women alone. Instead, the charter nests female representation within
those 50% quotas allocated for “historically disadvantaged groups” (Mantashe, 2018). Consequently, although the
Charter contains a quota for female employees at anywhere from 20-25%, it is necessary to consider that number
within another parent quota of disadvantaged groups, which further minimizes the actual percentage in practice.
South Africa’s example of a broad-based economic empowerment effort employs the business case in practice. It
uses numbers and percentages to meet industry goals of representation. This pares language and communication
around gender down to issues of quantity that only summarily address the trenchant gendered and cultural
difficulties in the minerals industry.
 Other scholars note that it is not a lack of language, but inadequate language surrounding women workers
in the minerals industry that has created a culture in mining that does not fully honor women’s equal rights, roles, or
responsibilities. In conducting a corpus-based discourse analysis of the representation of women in mining, Norberg
& Fältholm (2018) parsed search engine retrieval data to understand the “collocational search profiles of selected
search phrases” (207). This process allowed review of the terminology that appeared together when conducting
online searches on “women in the mining industry” and other, related, search strings. Upon retrieval of search string
results, the research team’s “immediate observation” was that the industry literature frames women not as equals to
their male counterparts, but as “complements” to the extant male skillset. While efforts pervade to recruit women
into the minerals industry, whether to meet diversity and innovation criteria (Fältholm & Norberg, 2017), to earn
seals of distinction for productivity and equity (Codelco, 2019; Canal de La Costa, 2017), or to follow overt legal
guidelines for equal work (Nacional, 1971), these efforts fail to include women in roles that highlight the
“innovation” of mining (Fältholm & Norberg, 2017) and often frame women as having to “adjust to the [male]
norm” of the industry (Norberg & Fältholm, 2018, 705). In any industry, innovation is the current buzzword or
truism of value (Botts, 2020), and the effort to exclude women’s work from that central line of value disparages
women’s rights and places women as having to fold into an industry culture where they are supplementary.
The linguistic structure that views women as the complements of male workers also jeopardizes women’s
permanence in the minerals industry. From a definitional perspective, complement raises the thought of a companion
or a comparison, leaving female miners unable to be independent contributors without the relational reference points
to men. Complement also encourages the mining and minerals industry to succumb to employing women as equals
only in those short-term periods where overwhelming need requires supplemental or complementary labor and must
look past the usual image of the “tough, masculine, outdoorsman” for the role (Mercier, 2011). Within her book,
Gendering the Field, Mercier (2011) reviews the historical pattern of how the Anaconda Mining Company in
Montana filled a labor need in the 1940s during the Second World War. For the brief period until the War’s end, it
was acceptable to hire wives, however, “[t]he conditions seemed clear; these women understood that they had to
relinquish their positions to men at the war’s end” (Mercier, 2011). Further, this language that places women’s labor
in a supporting role with an expected termination is not unique to the minerals industry. As Mercier (2011) also
notes, shipbuilding in the 1940s demanded recruits and hired women, with women making up 28 percent of the
workforce in Portland, Oregon during the war years (39). However, as historian Amy Kesselman (1990) observes,
these opportunities for women were fleeting and temporary because of governmental rhetoric with a “double
message” that women “should pursue new challenges of war” while “retain[ing] their primary identity as wives,
girlfriends, and mothers” (3). The connotations around primary and secondary in the 1940s resemble the
connotations around complementary work in the present day. There is a lack of independence within such relational
terms, a deference to temporality and a lack of permanence, and a quiet sense of extraction to be expected in a
foreseeable future when women will be again excluded just as quickly as they were included to fit into a presenting
need.
 While the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis focuses on verbal language and its influence on the development of a
culture, visual language, too, can have an equivalent effect. Advertising that seeks to engage women in mining and
minerals shows how visual language has created a culture in the industry that also effectively excludes women from
participation. Industry documents in the Queensland Resource Council (QRC) and Minerals Council of Australia,
for example, construct an ideal “mining woman;” this woman is around 20 to 30 years old, single, heterosexual, and
overwhelmingly white (Mayes & Pini, 2014). Though donning mining boots and presenting with a vest, this woman
is first a woman. As Mayes & Pini (2014) describe:

For example, a gauzy feminine scarf rests on the chair seat, a pair of high-heeled dress shoes sit on the floor
alongside the boots and a note on a board at the back of the desk reads ‘ring girls re coffee’. On the desktop
stands a framed picture of a white male and female tandem skydiving with the male on top of the woman,
signalling a sense of adventure (and youth), along with traditional heterosexuality.

While the minerals industry created these advertisements to change the perception around the roles of
women in mining, these contemporary efforts fall short in the same way that the mining company hiring efforts fell
short during World War II. This visual language of the minerals industry creates a female identity in the context of a
“framed picture of a white male” and espouses that identity “in tandem” with heterosexuality. These women are
determining their shape and place by comparison. These images of “a gauzy feminine scarf” and “high-heeled
shoes” show women as female first, adjusting or forcing fit—to use a term sifted from the aforementioned search
string reviews conducted by Norberg & Fältholm (2018)—in an industry that excludes them by deeming their
mining identity as secondary alongside unrealistic narratives that downplay realistic concerns like “negative
workplace culture towards female employees” as “minimal” (Mayes & Pini, 2014).
The unrealistic visual language of advertising also profiles “exceptional women” to increase the perception
of female representation in mining. The Queensland Resource Council (QRC) distributed these inspirational
publications in 2013 with a focus on it being “up to the women” to show their “value” to male peers and “influence
their work mates” (Mayes & Pini, 2014). This language of visual advertising creates the opposite of space and equal
representation in the industry. As (Mayes & Pini, 2014) note, the ads “frame…women [as] individually responsible
not only for making a place for women, but for demonstrating their value as women.” Here again, the identity of
woman precedes the identity of miner in a way that does not proffer equality with men in the industry, and further,
the sheer exceptionality of these example women can create a culture of unreachable and fictious expectations:
erasing the actual working women within the industry.

Building and Broadening a New Language to Create a Culture Around Gender

Using a broad conceptualization of the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis, it follows that if women can create an
independent language surrounding their contributions to the minerals industry, they might be able to develop a
culture within mining and minerals that supports women’s rights independent of a patriarchal structure. As Faltholm
& Norberg (2017) remind, having a “language both constitutes and reproduces attitudes and knowledge,” and this
idea of knowledge can be extrapolated out to creating a culture. Part of creating an independent language involves
expanding a current one with an understanding around the weight of terminology. At present, women who might
otherwise be represented in the industry are not, because of words. In industrial mining, much of women’s work
involves the transportation of materials because women have been prevented from working underground in mines
since the Mines Act of 1952, and transport women are not often identified as “miners,” the weight of their work
notwithstanding (Hinton et. al., 2003, citing Susapu and Crispin, 2001). A broadening of terminology can extend
respect as ‘miner’ to other necessary roles in the minerals industry, broadening representation in this case.
Beyond expanding terminology, however, developing an independent language entails creating
independent definitions. As Lahiri‐Dutt (2015a) broaches in her discussion on the feminization of mining, the field’s
transformation of the hyper-masculine type hinges on creating “new gender geographies of mining and expanding
the definition of mining” to include women. In other words, to change a field that currently excludes women, it is
necessary to add and earmark new land for women within the geography that encompasses the definition of that
field. The contemporary physical geographical “locational shift[s] of [the] large‐scale mining industry to the Global
South” is a first step (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015a). Perhaps in response to women claiming this Global South, as Hinton et.
al. (2003) raises in her discussion of artisanal mining, “[t]he percentage of female artisanal miners is the highest in
Africa, ranging between 40 and 50%. In some regions, the artisanal mining workforce is comprised of 60 to 100%
women (Hinton et. al., 2003, citing ILO, 1999; Amutabi & Lutta-Mukhebi, 2001; Onuh, 2002). These increased
statistics of female participation in the southern hemisphere echo and support the metaphorical changes in gender
geography and show the result of expanded definitions. Women are claiming these new spaces adding themselves to
the industry as mining is globalizing beyond Canada, Australia and the United States. These women are not only
temporary buttresses to male-dominated areas, but also luminaries in their own geographies to expand and populate
the new definitions of what it means to be a miner.
However, meanwhile, the minerals industry is also chartering new gender geographies and broadening
definitions by raising artisanal small-scale mining to the scope of respectable work. Women have been engaged in
artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) for generations, playing key roles in the panning and sorting that this field
requires. Women account for almost 50% of this sub-industry (Yakovleva, 2007). However, ASM has frequently
gone unregulated, and without “precise workforce data” being available for the field, it has always carried with it a
lesser respect (Hilson et. al., 2018). Early policy literature (e.g. Alpan, 1986; Noetstaller, 1987) frames ASM as a
kind of mining pursued by “opportunistic” or “rogue entrepreneurs,” (Hilson et. al., 2018). In 80% of cases where it
occurs, ASM occurs illegally, further stigmatizing its practice (Hentschel et al., 2003). In countries like Ghana,
where a sharp divide exists between legalized ASM and illegal ASM, the latter is termed galamsey, a term not only
denoting gathering and selling, but also sometimes connoting a derogatory sentiment contingent on context. As
larger corporations migrate to the Global South, however, it is easier to see that artisanal small scale mining is not
supplementary, ad hoc income, but instead, “of economic importance” and “a sizable share of the region’s mineral
production, including 18 percent of its gold, most of its cobalt, 15-20 percent of its diamonds and nearly all of its
coloured gemstones” (Hilson et. al. 2018, citing African Union, 2009). In his evaluation of the merits of ASM,
Verbrugge (2016) implies “that people who engage in ASM are well-positioned to accumulate wealth” (cited in
Hilson et.al., 2018). Verbrugge (2016) does not view artisanal small-scale miners as opportunistic but as “a
heterogeneous group of actors that are able to capitalize on the increased and more diverse demands of the mining
community” (cited in Hilson et.al., 2018, 109). In other words, per Verbrugge (2016), ASM is the evolutionarily
stable strategy in some interpretation of the extraction industry’s gold standard business case scenario. If mining is a
numbers game, the artisanal small-scale miners are diversifying assets and better serving the profession in what
society has construed their haphazard way. Seeing this theory manifest in practice, in Mongolia, state officials have
recognized ASM as a key element of sustainable livelihoods, acknowledging that from 2000 to 2008, individuals
employed within the sector increased by 170% from 20,000 to 54,000 workers. (Purevjav, 2011). Given the nature
of the industry, it can be concluded that many of these new workers were women. Therefore, “[r]ather than ban
ASM, the state [now] provides support in terms of the establishment of a legal framework in which ASM can safely
operate [in the country] although organisational and institutional capacity building have been called for in order to
protect livelihoods.” (Purevjav, 2011). Following Mongolia’s tentative acceptance and lead with formalizing and
increasing the respectability of ASM, efforts like the African Vision have emerged. The African Vision is a
continent-wide plan that seeks to regulate ASM by offering it the respect afforded to more mainstream avenues in
the extractions industry. This effort is significant because a country that supports its artisanal small-scale miners in
equal measure to its industrial miners is diversifying its assets and addressing broad demands of the mining
community. Given the number of women employed in ASM, broadening the definition of respectable mining in this
way also augments women’s inclusion and respect in the minerals industry. Leveling and expanding this definitional
geography of what mining means and includes will serve to include the women who, while already proliferating this
field, had worked uncounted within it before.
Evaluating the historically decreased respectability of ASM through the linguistic relativity hypothesis, a
problem of language could be what relegated ASM to its overshadowed place. This is a field that holds within it an
image of being complementary. As Yakovleva (2007) notes, “there is a consensus worldwide that ASM is largely
poverty-driven” which is to suppose that if the Human Development Index increases, this practice will disappear in
a country. ASM is secondary to a better circumstance in industrial mining, despite the equivalent hard labor that
ASM requires. Alternatively, as Hilson et. al. (2018) phrases it, “[t]he disposable income generated [by ASM] is
used by families to cover their household expenses such as school fees and funeral costs, and to support other
economic activities such as farming.” Hilson et al. (2018) provides this description to counter those of early scholars
who framed ASM as opportunistic or ad hoc to argue instead that ASM is a robust and systematic source of
economic revenue at the local level. However, the use of “disposable income” in this description again raises the
image of complementary. Per the coupling of ASM with its contribution to disposable income, artisanal small-scale
mining does not occupy the same level as other kinds of mining. It is a secondary bolster to primary earnings in the
industrial stream. Recalling Norberg and Fältholm’s (2018) findings from the aforementioned search engine
linguistic corpus analysis that highlighted how women are seen as “complements,” to male skillsets in the minerals
industry, it can be hard to know if the perception of ASM as complementary stems from the large percentage of
women in the field, or if the large percentage of women in the field have earned the field that image. Either way, the
historic status of ASM as lower than other, more respectable, forms of extraction could be a function of language
that has excluded it from the formalized definition of mining, and so too excluded, the many women who work
within it.

Cautions When Charting New Gender Geographies

In charting new gender geographies by including ASM and broadening definitions, however, it is important
to not exacerbate the discrimination against women that the initial changes in language seek to amend. In making
strides in the feminization of mining, it is easy for Lahiri-Dutt (2015a) to encourage a change in gender geography
when speaking of increased definitional reach. Per the schema theory in cognitive psychology, a schema is an
organized unit of human knowledge based in past experience, and our extant schemas shape and determine how we
integrate and assume new information (Pankin, 2013). A language of cartography and borders already exists in the
schema of the mining industry, and as such, Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s reinterpretation of such language might leave an
industry more open to her argument. Banks (2009) describes this existing vocabulary, noting that “[m]ining
operations, like all resource extraction operations, are cadastral: they draw lines on maps that translate into lines on
the ground” (47). Lahiri-Dutt (2015a) effectively takes advantage of what Banks (2009) calls a “powerful instrument
of social transformation” to use cartography’s language to draw new maps. However, the caveat is that
conversations of geography and boundary also divide. As Banks (2009) writes, “[t]hese lines effectively delineate a
group with access to a range of benefits or compensation (often on…[a] preferential basis…) and, at the same time,
another group of people or communities that have been rendered marginal in terms of the focus of the development”
(47). Flint (2016) carries the same reasoning on the risk of division via the creation of boundaries throughout his
book on geopolitical movements. The caution kept in this advice is that lines create categories, that one must be
wary when broadening definitions of roles to not exceed in an effort that could be more discriminatory in its
outcomes than its origins. Examples of this abound in Melanasia where the mapping of mines on the ground birthed
a sparring clan-like social structure in a community where such did not exist before (Banks, 2009). Golub (2007)
and Ernst (1999) discuss this “irony of organization” specifically in the Papua New Guinea context using the term
“land registration” instead of Banks (2009)’s cadastral mapping to describe how land allocation and overbearing
boundary delineation can inversely prompt a “social disintegration” that engenders discrimination. While Hilson et.
al. (2018) does not carry the cadastral line of reasoning, he does imply a similar caution when critiquing the African
Vision’s advancement of ASM: be suspicious of categorization and what can become lost in outlining categories and
trying to extrapolate them. One of the strengths of ASM is how variegated it is as a field, from country to country.
Its decentralization has been its primary merit that has encouraged its growth. Hilson et. al. (2018) warns that
regulating ASM to raise it to the respect of industrial mining is not a “one size fits all” strategy; what works to level
one country may need to be modified for the specifics of another. As we consider how women already work in
ASM, following Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s guidance to re-charter gender geographies and redraw maps to include
already extant women seems almost the easy answer; it is the associative property of equitable representation and
equity in the minerals industry that seems to require the least effort because it calls upon the definitional re-mapping
of women already present in the industry. That said, an industry that so privileges the business case scenario for its
simplicity is liable to lean towards the ease of this re-mapping to achieve gender representation. Meanwhile, it is
important to not overgeneralize a solution of definitional remapping to the point where the solution offered of
broadening definitions becomes a poor fit. In raising ASM to the respectability of industrial mining, voices in the
industry must recognize the details of each community because women’s roles and representations in ASM vary by
geography, true to its origins as a field. While including ASM in the definition of respectable mining is an answer to
problems of representation, it is an answer that is only cautiously generalizable.
The other caution when charting new gender geographies for women in the minerals industry is to not
replicate the ills of a colonial cultural history that has systematically erased minority communities and minority
women at the intersection of minority and female. While Lahiri-Dutt (2015a) seems a luminary in naming a “gender
geography,” for the minerals industry, reimagining lands has been present in cultural consciousness long before
Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s conceptualization for equality—present in tandem with warnings around this approach. In his
outline of the historical evolution of colonialization and land expansion, Orellana (2002) describes how just as the
Spanish philosopher Francisco de Vittoria appeared to “transform […] the international legal order” when Columbus
discovered the ‘New’ World by “arguing that all nations and all peoples of the earth, Indigenous Peoples, were
bound by the Ius Gentium.. [a] theory… [where] indigenous peoples had true dominion over their lands and could
not be dispossessed without [j]ust cause,” so there existed a simultaneous “doctrine of dispossession” that took hold
in other parts of the world like Australia to communicate the opposite message. Orellana (2002) writes, “[f]or
example, in Australia and other places, the legal doctrine of terra nullius was resorted to appropriate indigenous
lands. According to this roman-law theory, lands that had no owner could be appropriated by nations manifesting
such intention.” In other words, per the terra nullius doctrine, if a land had no claimant, then it could be assigned an
owner. As a result, what Orellana (2002) deems a “fictional representation” of the world governed future actions,
and “[a]ccordingly…lands were regarded empty or abandoned in spite of indigenous occupancy.”
The problem, as Walsh (1994) shows in her article, “New Horizons for the West,” is that these fictions
have a historical record of becoming fact and escaping the bounds of theory. Walsh (1994) describes how the
American Frontier was settled and reimagined in this way as a “EuroAmerican male experience” of “uncovering”
the new West for discovery. In this uncovering is carried a tacit image of an emptiness to fill by population. As
Walsh (1994) notes, “[t]hough other people were present in the movement west, they were not the most important
actors and could thus be either marginalised or stereotyped.” In other words, in what Walsh (1994) calls “the
lopsided West,” American Pioneerism erased diverse populations under the terra nullius motif of discovery. As she
writes,

The huge area west of the Appalachian Mountains was inhabited by numerous Indian or Native Americans
long before Europeans arrived. The smaller area west of the Mississippi River had been El Norte or north-
western Mexico for Mexican Americans for many years before westward-moving settlers crossed that river.
In addition to these antecedent settlers, Asiatic immigrants moved east across the Pacific ocean […]
 Further, in describing the diversity of the populations erased above, Walsh (1994) also notes that “nearly
half [of them] were of the female sex.” Essentially, following a fiction, all these real identities were expunged in the
process of broadening geographies and expanding the new Frontier. While perhaps theoretically supported through
the principles of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s solution to broaden gender geography by
changing language around an expanding land runs this same risk of succumbing to the imperfections of an ideal
employed in practice.
The novelty of the gender geography approach in the extractions industry may be what has not offered it
time to reckon with historical context. Questions of sociology and anthropology have grown only since the 2000s in
the minerals industry, as ancillary questions within other work (Ballard & Banks, 2003; McAllister, 2006; Taylor,
2006; Mélanie, 2006; Lawrence, 2005). The extractions industry has historically been described by business case
scenarios and occupational frameworks, and Lahiri-Dutt and colleagues seem some of the first scholars to ask purely
historical and sociological questions of the field. Given this, perhaps reflections on similarities between the
“broadening gender geography” solution to gender equality and the marginalization of colonialism have not
happened yet. Much reckoning of this marginalization of geography does speak specifically of the deleteriousness of
drawing boundaries in resource extraction, but instead, makes these statements more generally through other,
related, disciplines. For example, in his book, Introduction to Geopolitics, Flint (2016) writes about how “the
geographic extent of the nation is understood to be clear, it simply follows the lines on the map, and we are led to an
understanding of who belongs ‘belongs’ or is a member of the nation and who is a foreigner, alien, or whatever term
is used to describe ‘other’ (128). Flint warns that these binaries of “us/them” or “inside/outside” categories could be
problematic in creating “national myths” for “geopolitical codes” (128). Flint (2016)’s warning is another
permutation of the caution against mapping, but it is expanded further to include how the byproduct of that mapping
is the natural creation of dyads or binaries that are essentialist enough to be harmful or fictitious. Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)
does not address how she proposes to contend with these anthropological fictions or “national myths,” but these
problematic fictions of ‘expansion into emptiness’ seem to undergird her answers to the gender equality problem.
The lands that Lahiri-Dutt (2015a) suggests women claim as the extractions industry expands into the Global South
hint at terra nullius myth, although the discussion around ASM shows that they are neither entirely empty nor
poised to be assigned an owner in the woman miner who may seek them for equal representation. Given that the
minerals industry is also one susceptible to adopting a fictional and idealistic narrative in practice (Mayes & Pini,
2014; Eveline & Booth, 2002) or in literature (Antezana, 1986), the industry would do well to propose a way to
mitigate the harm of such runaway fictions before adopting a “cadastral” solution to “broaden gender geography” in
the name of gender equality efforts; as it stands, the proposal seems remiss of some historical context.
One consistently problematic example lies how Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s use of “Global South” does not
acknowledge the term’s history; this may feed into a binary that risks erasing gender identity rather than raising it or
expanding upon it. The mapping of the world into a Global North and Global South is not unique to the minerals
industry or to Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s description of the trajectory of the extractions frontier. As Meekosha (2011)
writes in Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally, for the ease of scholarship, the world has been
mapped into a “North/South terminology” since the 1960s, with a “Northern metropole” as a heuristic for describing
international relationships when speaking about marginalized identities:

‘North/South’ terminology came into use in the 1960s as shorthand for a complex of inequalities and
dependencies: industrialised versus raw material producing countries, rich versus poor, those with military
power versus those without, high technology versus low technology, and so on. ‘Southern’ countries are,
broadly, those historically conquered or controlled by modern imperial powers, leaving a continuing legacy
of poverty, economic exploitation and dependence. Not all populations in the South are poor: the global
periphery includes countries with rich classes (e.g. Brazil and Mexico) and relatively rich countries (e.g.
Australia). Even Australia, however, is regarded by global capital as a source of raw materials (timber,
coal, uranium, iron ore) and holds a peripheral position in global society, culture and economics
(Meekosha, 2011, 669).

For the purposes of discussion and categorization, there has been a paring of language and a creation of
binaries. Meekosha (2011) outlines how this hazard of oversimplification creates “dependencies” between and
among people and communities that may or may not be fully true, and so be discriminatory. While some may raise
that the work of a critical disability theorist is not relevant to the minerals industry, Meekosha (2011)’s repeated
focus on iron ores and raw material distribution suggests relevance to the concerns of the extractions industry.
Lahiri-Dutt (2015a), work may be inadvertently sketching some of those dependencies in her discussion the
distribution of women in the Global South. Possible harm notwithstanding, these are heuristics to organize an
understanding, and so they remain. Taking steps without critical analysis can create a system of “dependencies” and
relationships between and among communities and encourage conclusions about gender representations in the
minerals industry and movement into the Global South that might neglect nuances. If approached without nuance,
broadening gender geography can be just as discriminatory and exclusionary as it idealistically equalizing.
The linguistic relativity hypothesis might offer some answer on how changing the Lahiri-Dutt (2015a)’s
use of language might improve the resultant culture surrounding gender equality in the minerals industry. Recent
research has examined the specific effect of the word “landscape” on the resulting culture of the extractions
industry. Bigell (2014) specifically uses the word “dependency” to describe the meaning of landscape as directly
proportional to the growth of cultural context. Specific to resource policy, Swaffield (1991) proposes, that landscape
as a term exists on a continuum of understanding as physical land or perceptual—metaphorical—land that allows a
plurality of meaning that is more responsive to context and culture. Given how the Sapir-Whorf or linguistic
relativity hypothesis builds itself on the dependency that language frames a culture, this limited scholarship on the
effect of the word landscape to change a culture may be promising; as we discuss the ASM landscape, the Global
South landscape, or other shifts in terminology, the inherent plurality of possibility in a term may be a step towards
dismantling the problematic binary or cadastral lines and categories that limit gender equality in the extractions
industry.
An Excess of Language in an Effort to Do Good

The excess language inherent in protective legislation that has been passed in the minerals industry is
another avenue through which women have been excluded from the field. In a way, the industry’s contemporary
shift to enacting and obeying protective legislation is a manifestation of the geographer’s cadastral warning of the
perils and resultant marginalization that comes of having too many boundaries. It is true that the “root of much of
this protective legislation begins with good intention, as “[t]he philosophy behind such legislation was that the
worker, being in a weaker bargaining position than the employer, should be protected by the State from unfair and
harmful practices” (Connell, 1980). Protective legislation found its beginnings in the factories of the 1600s in
England, “protecting the health of the younger and weaker workers from injury by overwork or unwholesome
conditions” (Hutchins et al., 1907,1). Lahiri-Dutt (2020) concedes that “in the context of a specific country and a
specific time,” the initial protective legislations “unreservedly” responded to “valid concerns about the health and
welfare of women (such as miscarriages among women miners and high rates of infant morality)” in the mines. In
another example, as De Boeck describes them, the narratives of women working in the diamond mines of Luanda,
"convey…the contours of an infernal world, a moral economy of terror, a terra morta" (De Boeck, 1999, 104). This
space of terror is outlined further in stories detailing prostitution and sexual violence in Tanzanian and other African
mines (Rustad et al., 2016; Kotsadam et al., 2017). Banks (2009) cites prostitution, vagrancy, and domestic violence
as some of the “poster issues” of transnational resource extraction. Specific to artisanal mining’s ills, Hinton (2003)
writes:

Inhalation of fine, crystalline silica dust, which is generated from breaking and crushing rock, can result in
silicosis. Silicosis is an incurable lung disease that kills thousands annually (WHO, 2000). Conditions
resulting from silicosis include emphysema, lung fibrosis and silicatuberculosis. Advanced stages of
silicosis have been documented among women and children as young as 14 in Ghana (ILO, 1999).
Primarily due to widespread silicosis, life expectancy in the Bolivian Altiplano is barely 48 years (Quiroga,
2000)

Veritable health and wellness concerns towards women notwithstanding, as Lahiri-Dutt (2020) notes, when
the ILO Convention of 1999 adopted future protective legislation for women, it did so using as a “prototype” an act
that was discursively embedded in “ established ideals for decent work for women as per the Victorian norm.” The
Victorian norm frowned upon men and women clothed in mining garb and working together. The ILO Convention’s
adoption of legislation that had these historical roots inadvertently “confirm[ed] the normalized masculinity in the
industry…[and even] add[ed] to it…eventually shap[ing] the contemporary global context of hypermasculinity of
the mining industry.” Further, the ILO 1999’s decision to follow past precedence and adopt protective legislation
without much critical analysis created what Lahiri-Dutt (2020) describes as a “butterfly effect…from a single
country of origin,” spreading a practice that marginalized women to countries, cultures, and minerals industry
corporations completely “unconnected to the original legislation in the UK.” In other words, the UK prototype
spread to other countries to regulate female work, where this prototype was a poor fit, and so, marginalized female
workers. In a way, this is the worry of those who advocate for the proliferation of artisanal small scale mining as a
path to gender equality; protective legislation began with the same noble roots of gender accountancy but
subsequently has created a global problem of too much legislation that is actively inhibiting gender equality and
equity worldwide.
As Lahiri‐Dutt (2015) explains, much of the minerals industry is driven by an economic argument where
women continue the lineage to feed the labor supply, and as such, “women have become the subjects whose
biological functions—such as motherhood—are to be protected from mining's harsh environments.” The desire to
protect women from these illness and dangers, the desire to protect the labor supply, has led to the creation and
acceptance of a litany of protective legislations. In one example, The Mines Act of 1952 prohibits women from work
underground. In another report, Can’t Live Without Work, the North-Slave Métis Alliance of 2000, put in place
practices to protect women against sexually transmitted diseases and family violence, and “Hungary ratified the
Night Work (Women) Convention (Revised) 1934 (No. 41) in 1936 [that prohibited]... the employment of women
during the night in industrial undertakings" (Hipwell et. al., 2002, Gomori, 1980). It is paternalistic to think of these
protections as engendering gender equality because the laws operate from a male-dominant industry perspective to
make allowances for a female group, and as Banks (2009) further outlines, focusing on protective legislation as
remediating female “pathologies” like silicosis (Hinton, 2003) or menstruation (Hinton, 2003, citing Hemskirk,
2000; Lahiri-Dutt et. al., 2008), loses sight of broader questions surrounding mine work equality that should be in
conversation. Hinton (2003) goes as far as to suggest the protective legislation that manifests as “concerns for
women’s safety” is simply disguised “prejudice.” Recognizing this, the Mines Act of 1996 in South Africa lifted a
ban that had until then prevented women from working underground (Ramokhothoane, 2012). Meanwhile, the
Social and Labour Issues in Small-Scale Mining Report, argues that the sector is “bedevilled with too many
regulations that are mostly designed to constrain it” (ILO, 1999). Discussing other examples to substantiate the
complaint, the report skillfully elides the ways in which excess protective legislation towards women constrains the
equity, development and advancement of a large portion of women in the extractions industry workforce. If electing
to discuss this sidestepping via the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it is possible that the excess of protective
legislation towards women and vulnerable populations is also an excess of paternalistic language that marks
difference between men and women. “Bedeviled” by these restrictions of what is appropriate to broach, scholarship
and development goals can struggle in practice to create a culture around gender equality.
While some protective legislation is formal legislation as outlined above, some women face informal
protective legislation through cultural practices that manifest as exclusionary in the same paternalistic pattern.
Challenges in gemstone mining present in Zambia “due to the belief that women should not approach a gemstone
mine as the spirits of the stones would drive the gems deeper into the earth (Synergy Africa, 2001, cited in Hinton,
2003) or would disappear altogether (Kaingu, 2003). Some believe this is particularly significant during menses
(Hinton, 2003). In another example in the pre-colonial Andes, it was considered ‘bad luck’ for women to mine
underground long before formal protective legislation prohibiting such (Mercier, 2011; van Hoecke, 2006), and a tio
de la mina was believed to hide minerals in the presence of women, further encouraging limiting female miners (van
Hoecke, 2006; Garcia et. al., 2004). In Maroon culture, menstruating women are prevented from mining and are
exiled to a hut due to taboos around touching men, engaging in sex, or cooking for men during menstruation,” and
the repercussions of these limits prompt a culture around oral contraceptives in the mines” (Hinton, 2003, citing
Heemskerk, 2000). While it may be important to recognize some biological difference in the male and female body
while constructing gender, these informal protective measures create a separate language around women that creates
a separate culture around women, and that ultimately promulgates inequalities.
Drawing remedy from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, removing the boundaries created by language and
syntax can encourage flexibility in the culture that that language seeks to create. Recent efforts attempt to achieve
this by paring the excess language borne by protective legislation towards women. Some scholars accomplish this by
dismissing the base concerns for vulnerable populations that engendered protective legislation in the first place, and
in so doing, dismiss the protective legislation. For example, Bryceson et. al (2013) addresses prostitution by
dismissing it as a problem of definition and perspective where “the polygamous practices of Islam and the
monogamous strictures of Christianity have played a role in unfolding sexual relations.” These scholars further
describe how the label prostitute was broadly applied to “[unattached] women who dared to leave their home areas
and the protection of their lineage to face moral censure,” so diluting the hazardous connotation the term prostitute
carries—the same hazardous connotation to which any protective legislation on sex work or night work sought to
respond. Further, to erase the informal protective legislation imposed on women by cultural beliefs and expectations,
contemporary mining companies attempt to disrupt the spaces in which cultural practices settle. An Australian
mining company, to fulfill its corporate social responsibility, for example, tried a system of traveling mining staff
who did not live at the extraction site (Torkington et. al., 2011). However, some scholars view gains for gender
equality in these fly-in/fly-out work forces as losses in other spheres as miners did not connect with the local social
fabric in the same way as before and did not feel as responsible for the structural and environmental damages
created on the local level for the residents by the mine (Carrington & Pereira, 2011a; Carrington & Pereira, 2011b;
Carrington & Hogg, 2011; Carrington, Hogg & McIntosh, 2011; McIntosh, 2012).
Changing the language that caters to women can also intervene in harmful protective legislation. The
minerals industry views women as having inherently balancing qualities that improve the labor force. In the
Northern Rhodesian copper belt, for example, “corporations encouraged mineworkers to live off-site with their
wives to enhance the ‘stability’ of the labour force” (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015, citing Parpart, 1986). Analogously, in
Indonesia, married workers were preferred given the ‘stabilizing effect’ of their wives (Lahiri-Dutt, 2015a, citing
Erman, 2002 & Robinson, 1986), and this “stabilizing effect’ repeats in South African mines (Ramokhothoane,
2012). As Hinton (2003) describes, women were often cited for their “reliability” and sobriety (5). These are all
terms that proliferate language in the minerals industry only in those spaces where female miners are part of the
discussion. Laplonge (2017) criticizes this approach to feminism in the industry, noting that “[t]hese claims rely on
essentialist ideas about how women behave” and reminds that “[w]omen who work in mining do not display a
particularly strong or unique connection to the environment which would encourage them to drive change in their
workplaces.” Although Laplonge (2017) does not broach Meekosha (2011)’s concept of dependencies, what his
work does suggest is that the essentialization of women, and a language that is used in the minerals industry only
around women is unnecessary at best and false at worst. Removing the specific vocabulary would also serve to strip
some of the protective legislation that is geared towards women. Sifting the language may also leave what remains
as more equitable for both genders.

The Nostalgia Roadblock

In order to sustain modern efforts that include women in the minerals industry, it is important to anticipate
and curtail the nostalgia that might interrupt or retrogress newly forged paths. As De Boeck (1999) notes in his
chapter, “Dogs Breaking Their Leash,” “nostalgia inevitably accompanies globalization” (90). More broadly, this
globalization can be construed as a kind of metonymy for change that "often come[s] with a deeply felt sense of
loss, of nostalgia and mourning for 'disappearing worlds'” (De Boeck, 1999). The minerals industry does evidence a
penchant for nostalgic idealism. The idea of a Miners Haven evidences this in how it creates an ideal structure with
limited regulation and expanded license within the minerals industry that calls back an unregulated past (Course
Readings, Week 1). Another example of idealism in the industry lies in the prevalence of the “ideal mining woman”
who leans into a cult of domesticity archetype while existing in recruitment advertising from the 2000s. For how it
fails to properly include women, leaning into an ideal when discussing gender representation and equality in the
minerals industry would undo any efforts at real equality. The masculine miner with the female ancillary is an old
ideal that is misplaced, and in the wake of language changes and alternations of conceptual frameworks, it is
necessary to not retreat into the comfort of that image. Carrington & Hogg (2011) discuss another idealism in the
minerals industry—gold rushes to strike it rich; they offer a strategy through which to interrupt halcyon idealism
generally. They write of “images reminiscent of mining booms of the past…when thousands of individuals hop[ed]
to strike it rich and rowdy settlements sprung up spontaneously on the backs of the population influx, the sudden
wealth and the fast spending. The mining industry may derive a certain advantage from association with such
images, but in reality contemporary mining has nothing in common with them. These are corporate undertakings,
carefully planned with strict labour regimes.” The undercurrent of analysis here is that the ideal miner is not real.
The idea is a figment of the past that no longer fits into a present proliferated by corporate mines; to interrupt the
idealism is an exhortation that the past is qualitatively different from the present of the minerals industry and the
actions of miners, of industry, and of legislators should reflect such. In the advice is a reminder that the minerals
industry as a corporate effort has sanded some of the storied rugged individualism of the past. A pessimism perhaps,
but one to keep the narrative or nostalgia at bay while anchoring an industry in the present and planning into the
future.
If desiring to adopt a linguistic-relativity framework, the minerals industry can launch from its extant
economic one in order to change a culture. In his discussions surrounding mining in Asia and the Pacific, Banks
(2009) takes an accepted economic or business case approach and focuses heavily on the financial effects of
extraction in Melanasia; he highlights how the cash-flow benefit streams that come into local communities from
large-scale mines are not always positive. Broaching anthropologist Colin Filer's "social disintegration" thesis,
Banks (2009) cites the closure of the Bougainville copper mine in 1989 because of the "corrosive" and "destructive"
effects on small Melanesian communities. Here, the minerals industry was unable to negotiate the social norms:
unable to manage the "distribution of large sums of cash" which led to "internal disputes, between families and
generations over the equity of patterns of distribution" (Banks, 2009, 49). As Banks (2009) describes it, "[t]he
societies did (and in most cases still do) have a range of mechanisms for spreading the objects of customary trade
and exchange (pigs, shell money, etc), but it cannot be expected that these same mechanisms will provide a basis for
the equitable distribution of millions of kina in cash." In other words, this Melanasian community had a mechanism
of currency, but that currency was inadequate for the level of exchange and distribution that was required to sustain
the mine, culture and community. This closure of the Bougainville mine and the social disintegration thesis that
prompted it are well known in the industry, and the LRH, in part, is positing a similar problem. Whereas Banks
(2009) outlines how the inadequacies of currency can bear on a culture, the LRH provides a lens through which to
see how the inadequacies in language can create problems in the same. Highlighting similar patterns of reasoning
between the two stories might encourage members of the minerals industry to see relevance in the theoretical
framework of the linguistic relativity hypothesis as it proposes some solutions for gender equality in the extractions
industry.
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Addendum: Source from Course Reading, Week 1 that references the “Miner’s Haven” is not included here because I did
not have D2L access to obtain the original source.