Unequal ground: How extraction deepens inequality
- Blossom Matizirofa
New research suggests women remain under-represented in the mining industry
Workers have played a fundamental role in shaping our economic landscape as well as our rights in the workplace. Mining, in particular, is often framed as a cornerstone of the country’s economic growth, as it is a sector that also creates employment and sustains communities. But this kind of narrative only presents us a piece of the larger picture. It does not fully explain who bears the cost of this mineral wealth or how the costs of the sectors' successes are not equally distributed.
The reality is that the impact of the extractives sector on people’s lives is not experienced equally. Research has shown that these industries do not operate in a social vacuum. Their impacts are shaped by existing gender norms, labour structures, and inequalities. In fact, the studies suggest that resource-dependent economies tend to demonstrate higher levels of gender inequality, with the benefits and burdens of extraction distributed along deeply gendered lines. The extractive industries are thus shaped by race, by gender, by class, and by the systems that determine whose labour is valued and whose is made invisible.
This is why an intersectional lens becomes important. Inequality in the extractive sector is not experienced in a single sphere. It is formed by overlapping forms of marginalisation and oppression where gender interacts with race, class, and geography to produce distinctive experiences of harm. Research on intersectionality in South Africa reflects and confronts how distinct forms of discrimination intersect with one another, with Black women specifically experiencing both racialised and gendered marginalisation within the workforce and beyond.
A recent collaborative report produced by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies together with partner organisations working in the areas of gender struggles in the South African mining and automative sectors was conducted. The report highlights that women remain significantly underrepresented in extractive industries, despite legal and policy commitments to transformation. Even where women participate in the sector, they often navigate the sector on unequal lines drawn by patriarchal norms and exclusionary systems.
These inequalities start with accessibility. Women remain significantly underrepresented in the mining sector, making up a small proportion of around 13.2% of the sector’s workforce. But even this does not capture the full picture. An intersectional perspective shows that these inequalities are not experienced equally. Black women in particular are positioned at the intersection of racial, gendered, and economic disadvantage, often occupying the most disadvantaged positions in the economy.
The costs are not only economic; they are also social and environmental. In mining-affected communities, women often disproportionately experience environmental degradation. When land and environments are degraded or water sources are negatively impacted, it is more often women who must adapt in finding other usable water for their households, handle food insecurity and manage their households in such unstable conditions. These burdens are deepened for poorer households, where there are less means to absorb environmental issues. These responsibilities reflect broader gendered divisions of labour, where women carry a disproportionate share of unpaid care work.
Simultaneously, women within the extractives sector face even more risks. Workplace environments continue to expose women to harassment, gender-based violence, and exclusion. These dangers are also not faced by workers in the same way either. Younger women, contract workers, and those in more dangerous forms of employment often face intensified exposure to the risks, with fewer protections and less access to adequate reporting mechanisms.
For LGBTQI+ workers in the extractives industry, intersectionality reveals another layer of invisibility. There is, however, still inadequate data on LGBTQI+ workers in these sectors, which contributes to their exclusion from both policy and accountability frameworks. Research on workplace inclusion in South Africa shows that LGBTQI+ workers often navigate environments where disclosure carries extra risk, particularly in sectors where toxic forms of masculinity dominate. When these identities intersect with race, class, or migrant status, vulnerability can be even more pronounced.
Despite these lived realities, corporate accountability frameworks often fail to reflect this complexity. Many forms of workplace harm especially those linked to gender and power, remain underreported or ineffectively addressed within formal system frameworks.
More broadly, corporate due diligence processes tend to treat risk as something that can be identified, measured, and managed through standardised frameworks. But intersectional harm is not easily captured in this way. With gender and extractivism, harm is often unequal, context-specific, and rooted in the socio-economic structures of the country, making it difficult to challenge within standardised reporting systems.
Consequently, corporate accountability risks flattening lived experience. A mining operation may be compliant on paper, while the differentiated impacts of extraction along lines of gender, race, and class continue to be silenced. As broader studies on inequality in South Africa has shown, economic systems continue to reproduce structural disparities, even where formal protections exist. The existence of legal protections does not inevitably translate into equality and justice in practice.
Addressing this requires more than inclusion. It requires a paradigm shift in how harm itself is understood. An intersectional approach to corporate accountability would ask different questions like who is most affected? Whose experiences are not being captured fully and what forms of harm remain invisible because they do not fit within existing frameworks?
This Worker’s month is thus an opportunity to not only recognise past injustices but to challenge the struggles that are ongoing in the present. If we are serious about equality, dignity and justice in the workplace, then we must be willing to recognise the systems of extraction are structured by inequality and until such structures are fully confronted, the promise of just advancement and transformation will remain an ideal rather than reality.
Blossom Matizirofa is based in the Business & Human Rights and Environmental Justice Programmes at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Wits University.