Without Equity and Justice, Mining Leaves Women Behind
In mining regions, women face distinct costs of weak governance: higher care and household responsibilities, exclusion from jobs and decision-making, and gender-specific risks such as sexual corruption. Yet these realities remain largely absent from high-level climate and energy discussions.
This September, diplomats and policy experts gathered at climate summits in Addis Ababa and New York, setting the stage for negotiations at COP30 in November. At these events, Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) and Resource Justice Network underscored a critical point: there can be no just transition without more equitable sourcing and value chains for transition minerals, and central to this is ensuring a fairer deal for women.
The hidden cost of weak governance and corruption
Our organizations have long collaborated to bring a gender focus to natural resource governance, publishing a Feminist Natural Resource Governance Agenda in 2020, and to highlight the importance of tackling corruption. Over the past year, we’ve continued to expose challenges to a fairer, more inclusive mining sector, including through events at New York Climate Week (CWNYC). Resource Justice Network convened women from the Global South to speak on the systemic social, economic and financial barriers to a just transition and on solutions to overcome them.
NRGI co-hosted a roundtable exploring how to better engage communities in the energy transition, where we drew on our work with the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, SIRGE Coalition and WWF. Our joint briefing Digging Into the Problem shows how corruption in the mining sector directly undermines equity and inclusion, diverting revenues and social benefits from mining, such as jobs, education, healthcare and local development, away from those who need them most. Women, who rely more heavily on public services and social infrastructure, suffer disproportionately.
Corruption’s gendered impacts
Women face distinct corruption risks. Sexual corruption—in which access to jobs, services, permits or compensation is exchanged for sexual favors—is enabled by the male-dominated nature of the industry, weak enforcement of legal protections and fear of retaliation. While underreported in extractives, sexual corruption is real and pervasive. At the same time, discriminatory mining laws in several countries prohibit single, pregnant or unmarried women from certain mining activities, embedding exclusion in policy. Community development funds from mining often lack gender budgeting or gender-disaggregated targets, leaving women and girls underserved or entirely invisible.
The environmental and social impacts of mining compound these inequalities. Women in frontline communities, often responsible for water collection, food production and caregiving, must travel further, work harder and sacrifice income and time when natural resources and the environment are degraded by pollution and deforestation. At the same time, women also shoulder increased care responsibilities when relatives fall ill or leave the area for new opportunities, further limiting their economic and social participation.
Corruption also drives land grabbing and erodes land rights. Where tenure systems are unclear or informal, companies and state actors can exploit legal gray areas to displace entire communities, often without fair consultation or compensation. Women, less likely to hold formal land titles, are especially vulnerable, reinforcing both economic and political marginalization.
Yet, despite bearing disproportionate impacts, women are consistently excluded from decision-making spaces around mining activities. Local governance bodies, permit review panels and project consultations often fail to engage women meaningfully or at all, leading to unjust outcomes and undermining of environmental governance.
How mining deepens women’s burdens
At Resource Justice Network’s CWNYC event, we heard directly how these issues are impacting women in mining-affected regions. A panelist stressed that the “masculinization” of mining sites often fuels violence and abuse against women, including sexual exploitation, harassment, disappearances and killings. For Indigenous Peoples’ communities in mining zones, jobs are presented as benefits, but the creation of “men-camps” often breaks family structures and spreads violence. Only by fully realizing Indigenous Peoples’ right to Free, Prior and Informed consent can such negative outcomes be avoided.
These interventions contrasted starkly with many CWNYC events focused on technological solutions to climate problems. NRGI and Resource Justice Network participated in a panel discussion about the impacts of AI on mining and gas production in low- and middle-income countries, which highlighted the importance of bringing equity considerations, including gender, into AI policy dialogues. But, as we noted, technology alone cannot solve systemic exclusion, and may even worsen it if underlying power dynamics are ignored. Recognizing these risks is not a barrier to progress, but key to unlocking it.
The path forward: a gender-inclusive mining sector
Corruption and gender inequality are not side effects of the transition mineral boom, they are structural barriers to climate justice. The choice is clear: repeat past mistakes, or build a model of mineral governance that is inclusive, transparent and just.
Governments, companies and international actors must ensure that women are not an afterthought, but equal partners in shaping the decisions that will define this transition. Principles 3 and 4 of the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals set out what is needed: women’s groups must be engaged before, during and after mining operations, and anticorruption safeguards must address gender-specific vulnerabilities.
Only with gender-responsive governance and by dismantling entrenched inequalities can the promise of the energy transition be shared equitably. To advance these goals:
- Sexual corruption must be recognized as a crime; legal instruments at all levels must be updated to reflect this, and courts and tribunals at the national, regional and global level must enforce them efficiently to tackle impunity;
- Governments should enshrine gender and anti-corruption safeguards in law and ensure that mining revenues are directed towards public services.
- Companies should ensure that their anticorruption policies and any community development agreements acknowledge the gendered impacts of corruption and development decisions in the mining sector and seek to address these, for example through enforcing zero tolerance policies for sexual corruption and ensuring adequate funding for gender programs.
- States parties to the UNFCCC should make equity central to COP30 commitments and finance incentives that strengthen women’s voices in climate change negotiations. By including the first-ever mention of minerals in COP text, delegates can build on the work of the UN Secretary General’s Panel and send a strong signal that a fairer and more equitable mining sector is essential to a just transition.
