Introduction

Extractivism creates both environmental and social injustices because it is rooted in systems of oppression, patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism. Gender and extractivism are intertwined in multiple and complex ways. Here, we lay out these links and call for gender justice and dismantling patriarchy to be considered central to anti-extractivism movements and deeply necessary for post-extractive futures.

Extractive projects, their impacts and resistance to them, are highly gendered. Women and girls are often first and worst impacted but also on the frontlines of resistance to extractivism, while the extractive sector is often gendered as a masculine space. Adopting an intersectional gendered lens to all aspects of extractivism is needed to understand how certain groups of people experience extractive violence and oppression in different ways. 

(Eco)feminist movements have been central in calling out destructive extraction, as well as narratives of green growth and green extractivism. Instead, they highlight the many ways to embrace a life-sustaining society beyond extractivism that already exist today. 

What is Gender?

Gender is socially constructed. This means it’s not about biology, but the ways that people are socially conditioned, or taught, to take on different roles in society and perform certain gendered identities. Gender is not just about women, but is about the power relationships between men, women and gender non-conforming peoples. Gender is fluid, it changes across cultural contexts and times, it is not binary (i.e. just man or woman), it includes trans, intersex and non-binary people. European colonialism imposed a strict gender binary on colonised cultures, erasing a wide range of genders and sexualities that were common before. Many cultures have more than two genders, for example, the Two Spirit folks in Indigenous North American societies. As a key organisational aspect of society, gender often determines the division of labour in society, that means who does the productive work (normally waged work done by men) and who does reproductive work (care work and domestic roles, often unpaid work done by women). The genders that are marginalised by patriarchy (women, girls, trans, intersex and non-binary people) experience the impacts of extractivism first and worst. 

Feminist understandings of Extractivism 

Feminism is a political tool, social movement and analysis of power and oppression. It works towards equality between all genders and sexes and aims to fight patriarchy. Ecofeminism is a reaction to how women and nature have been marginalised and devalued in modern patriarchal society, and highlights that all types of domination (capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy) are connected, therefore, one cannot be eliminated without the others.

Feminists have highlighted that extractivism is not just about the removal of resources from the ground but a specific way of relating to the world, a worldview and about relations of power. It is a model of relationships that are non-reciprocal and that destroy, enclose and rupture relations between people and the rest of the living world. Feminist approaches are important because they emphasise that extractive logics are rooted in oppressive systems of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. Therefore, only systemic change and different ways of relating to each other and the more-than-human can resist extractivism and build post-extractive worlds. 

 

Extractivism and Patriarchy

Patriarchy is a social system of domination, control, exploitation, hierarchy and supremacy. Under this system women are oppressed, and their bodies and work are exploited. It is a system, not just about individuals, all genders can act in patriarchal ways and can be hurt by patriarchy. Patriarchy, like colonialism, divides the world into strict binaries or opposites, with one valued more than the other. This includes, man above woman, people above nature, western above non-western, science above tradition, mind above body. The devalued side of the binary, like women, nature, non-western peoples are dehumanised and treated like a resource to extract from. Colonialism and capitalist patriarchy are intertwined systems that are at the root of extractivism and extractive violence. 

“But women are—and have always been—viewed as disposable. Extractivism was born out of colonialism, which wasn’t just about conquering land. It was also about taking control of women’s bodies, silencing them, and turning them into objects for male consumption. That context impacts everything.” Winnet Shamuyarira, the project coordinator at WoMin African Alliance

Feminists say this way of thinking about the world is at the root of our social and environmental crises. Extractivism is rooted in this patriarchal worldview, both women and the Earth are treated like an object, to extract from to make profit. Patriarchy and gender inequality has a huge impact on power relations and control of land and natural resources, therefore they are central components when thinking about extractivism. 

The concept of territorio/cuerpo/tierra from Latin American Feminist and Indigenous movements is important when thinking through extractivism and patriarchy. It emphasises the interconnectedness of territories, bodies and land. The body and territory are seen as sites of control and colonial extraction, but also as sites of resistance and agency. 

 

Extractivism and Gendered Impacts

Extractive industries do not deliver the “development” they promise, instead they leave a host of environmental devastation, displace communities and worsen social, economic and gender inequality. This is because extractivism reproduces capitalism, patriarchy and (neo)colonialism.

Most of the socio-environmental costs of the extractive industry are felt by the mainly rural populations of extractive regions, however women are often disproportionately impacted. While most jobs are held almost exclusively by men, the negative effects are felt in the household and community, where due to gender socialisation, women have the most responsibility.  

Women are the most impacted by extractive development, not because of inherent vulnerability, but because of systems, like capitalist patriarchy, positioning them as caregivers and enforcing structural inequalities. Patriarchal structures mean women have less access to decision making, land, resources and power. There is a material link. Not all women experience these impacts the same, an intersectional approach is important. Age, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, migration status, caste, ability, and more, are all factors that create different lived experiences for women in relation to extractivism. Indigenous women and women across the Global South are further impacted by colonialism. 

Research highlighting the gendered impacts of mining can be understood in four categories: environmental impacts, health impacts, community displacement, and violence against women. 

 

Environmental Impacts: Water and Food Sovereignty 

The gendered division of labour brings women in contact with natural resources and the environment for subsistence.  Women, as primary caregivers, have a material connection as key stakeholders in small-scale farming and managing natural resources. Women produce up to 80% of the food in the Global South, they also have important roles in managing water systems and firewood, saving seeds, caring for livestock and in forest conservation. When extractivism impacts the local environment, women are on the frontline of its impacts. Women in many cultures are responsible for water. Extractive projects exhaust and contaminate water supplies, in these cases women are often the first to notice water is drying up or making people sick. This places a heavier care-work burden on, normally younger women, who must travel farther to collect water. These impacts are especially felt by Indigenous communities and those with subsistence economies that rely on natural resources for hunting, fishing, foraging, medicine and culture. 

 

Health Impacts 

The land, air and water contamination caused by extractivism makes communities sick, placing more care-giving burdens on women. Women’s central role in agriculture and day to day tasks that bring them in contact with the environment mean they are more exposed to toxic substances and heavy metals. The attack on nature by mining industries also impacts on women’s bodies as the effects of radiation poisoning are most apparent on reproductive systems with increased cases of ovarian cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. Indigenous women are on the frontline of these impacts. In South Dakota a toxic legacy of uranium mining disproportionately impacts the health of Indigenous Oglala Lakota women. Women of All Red Nations (WARN) make connections between uranium contamination and the high rates of miscarriage and reproductive cancers among Lakota women. Extractivism can also increase poverty and food insecurity, which is gendered, women are often first to reduce how much they eat. These further impacts neonatal and maternal health. 

 

Community Displacement and Loss of Communal Land 

Land grabbing and the selling off and occupation of land by extractive industries leads to community displacement. Often communal lands, that women especially depend on for farming, foraging, firewood and water are enclosed (gated and made private). The gendered impact of displacement is heavy, placing a huge physical and mental burden on women who are responsible for their family’s and community’s well-being with a lack of access to resources and power. It also alters the social fabric both socially and economically. Extractivism depends on rupturing community cohesion, it creates divisions that destroy community care and support practices, which often women depend on more for survival. 

Many Indigenous, peasant and rural women have strong ancestral and spiritual ties to the land. Women’s experiences from Zimbabwe detail how the loss of land to extractivism is more than just a material loss, it is a deep spiritual and emotional wound. The land is understood as sacred and ancestral and women are custodians of traditional knowledge related to these sacred places, its loss impacts their cultural identity and spiritual well-being. This destruction of these deep-rooted relationships with place is seen across many extractive contexts and is a tactic of extractive logics that try to turn living landscapes into “natural resources” to extract from. 

 

Violence Against Women (VAW) 

The extreme violence and human rights abuses that accompany extractivism is felt in gender specific ways. Women’s bodies and the land are both exploited and commercialized by extractive violence. There is a link between sexual violence and extraction zones globally. The transient and mainly male workforce surrounding extractive projects can increase sexual exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence, this comes with added health risks like HIV. When this violence is intersected with race and ethnicity it becomes even more brutal. Many large-scale extractive projects take place in post-conflict contexts or ongoing conflict zones where VAW is normalised, and women’s position is particularly precarious. The militarization and securitisation around extractive projects can increase gender violence, cases of sexual assault carried out by security forces employed by extractive companies are documented globally. For example, security for Barrick Gold raped women at the Porgera mine in Papua New Guinea.  

Extractivism can also increase structural violence towards women. In many cases extractivism reinforces patriarchal dynamics, like a gender binary and strict gender roles in society. Men often receive cash wages, making women more dependent on them and their decision making. Women lose cultural, economic and social status. This dynamic also can lead to increases in alcoholism, domestic violence and abuse. Because of patriarchal inequalities in society women are often left out of decision making and discussions around land and ownership. Compensation is normally paid to head of households which are predominately recorded as male. Gender-based violence increases with displacement, increasing poverty, and a loss of resources, all common consequences of extractive projects.

The extractive sector is represented as highly masculinised, however, women still participate as workers but often in informal, badly paid, precarious roles. This is largely in the Artisan and Small-scale Mining (ASM) sector. Due to gender norms, women who work in mines, sometimes face shame and ostracization by society. This short video, “Nadirah” explores honour and shame for a female informal coal miner in Tajikistan. 

 

Women on the Frontlines of Resistance to Extractivism

Women are much more than passive casualties of extractivism, they are not victims, but fighters. Women Human Rights and Environmental Defenders are standing up to extractivism across the world. As noted, women experience the material impacts of extractivism first and worst, therefore, they are often the first to stand up and resist. For many women their resistance is seen as an extension of their care-work, what some ecofeminists call Earthcare. Research has focused on women’s motivations, practices and experiences of resistance, from Colombia, to Ecuador, to Greece, to Ireland and the Pacific. 

Often this resistance is globally networked. Feminist solidarity building beyond borders, is linking affected communities internationally, against toxic extractivism. Also, a number of collectives and networks organise with grassroots struggles against extractivism from a gendered and feminist perspective. The Ecofeminaria Initiative: Women in Defense of Territories and The Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Sociales y Ambientales, are working in Latin America to foreground the gendered impacts of extractivism and feminist alternatives. WoMin is a pan-African ecofeminist alliance building solidarity and movements against extractivism as well as woman-centred just alternatives. WoMin highlight the role of peasant women in Sub-Saharan Africa in organising to resist and hold mining corporations to account and reclaim lands taken by extractive industries. 

Feminist anti-extractive movements have also been intersecting with other social justice movements, connecting across struggles that challenge extractive capitalism, colonial and patriarchal violence. This includes movements for health and reproductive justice, drawing on the concept of “body as territory”. Also the connection between Indigenous and peasant rights and anti-imperial struggles, as seen from the solidarity of those resisting the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia with the people of Palestine throughout the ongoing genocide. The roots of these issues are interconnected, these struggles show it’s more than about a specific mine, but about a system predicated on violence and death. Building strong coalitions across connected issues is an important tool of resistance.

Historical and Material Connection

Historically women have fought against the commercialization of nature, resisting land enclosures and defending communal cultures. Silvia Federici argues that three hundred years of witch hunts in Europe, that followed the peasant revolts that accompanied the transition to a capitalist system, were a tool to subjugate and control the power of women. Colonial violence around the world enforced this gendered system. In turn, this ensured that women provided reproductive work for free, to continue producing and caring for a workforce. Despite this, women have continued to be at the front of the defence of the commons since the inception of colonial capitalism. This includes defending commons from the enclosures by extractive industries. Globally due to the gendered division of labour, women rely heavily on commons for subsistence livelihoods and so are often involved in resisting their enclosure. 

Women are more affected due to a lack of resources and power dynamics within society, not an innate vulnerability. Material approaches argue participation of women in resistance movements stems from their closer day to day contact and use of Nature and caring for a healthy environment and their greater awareness and respect for community cohesion and solidarity. This material link is key, however, some women make political use of traditional gender roles, such as motherhood, for mobilisation or draw on a biological link between women and the Earth. There is a diversity of women’s motives of engaging in resistance, some traditionally feminine and some not, reminding us there are many ways for a woman to become an activist, not all of which depend on discourses of motherhood and caring.

Challenges of Resistance

When women stand up, they face a range of gender specific challenges. Not only are women taking on corporate and state power, but they are transgressing traditional gender norms and conventions. Violence or the threat of violence is used to maintain patriarchal power and gender binaries. 

A report by AWID outlines how women face criminalisation, stigmatisation and smear campaigns against them, militarisation by private and public security, and marginalisation in their own communities and movements. Women Earth Defenders face severe threats in many contexts, from sexual violence to murder. For example, Rosane Santiago Silveira was tortured and murdered in 2019 for her resistance to extractive industries and Dora Recinos Soto was shot dead for her resistance to the El Dorado mine in El Salvador. The role of women in resisting extractivism is often minimised and sidelined, even within movements, drawing attention to the ways women resist is key. 

Further, resistance to mining is ridden with invisible work, which is often done by women. Because of the way women are socialised they are often more responsible for care work, emotional labour, building relationships, administrative tasks and more. Not romanticising resistance but also acknowledging the added burden on women is important. There is a need to emphasise inequalities around gender including the invisibility of women’s contributions and the silencing of their concerns in anti-mining activism. 

On the other hand, women’s involvement in anti-extractive resistance can also transform traditional gender norms. Resistance in Greece altered the patriarchal structure of society and rhythm of everyday life as women took on leadership roles and care work was redistributed throughout the community. Women’s resistance can generate new ways of thinking about the world, for example, the concept of territorio/cuerpo/tierra  emerges from Guatemalan Indigenous activists’ opposition to the El Escobal mine. This brings us to the varied feminist alternatives for a post-extractive world. 

 

Feminist Futures Beyond Extractivism

A feminist perspective means taking a structural approach. In many mainstream discussions of gender and extractive industries the focus falls on including women in the perceived benefits from extractivism. The argument goes, the extractive sector needs legal and regulatory reform to address gender inequality, so women can participate more fully in the system. This neoliberal viewpoint, which focuses on individuals rather than the system, argues if we incorporate more women into the current system things would be better. In contrast to this, a feminist approach is systemic and structural, it sees the whole extractivist model and worldview as the issue: we need to challenge the colonial and capitalist roots of the extractivist system. If a mining company is still structured around pursuing endless growth, with the human rights and environmental injustices that go along with that, having more female CEOs is not a solution. 

Instead, grassroots feminist movements around the world are proposing and enacting alternative development models to extractivism. This includes a huge array from agroecology, to commoning, community owned energy, seed saving, projects that centre traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge, Rights of Nature movements, solidarity economies based on care and more. Feminist approaches call for system change, not green capitalism, technological fixes or eco-modernisation. This map prepared by the Latin American Network of Women Defenders of Social and Environmental Rights shows the impacts on women of extractivism across Latin America but also women’s role in building alternatives. The ONAMIAP Women initiative in Peru are working towards a just energy transition that is based in community and ancestral knowledge and challenges extractive capitalism. Adivasi Indigenous women in India are using traditional ecological knowledge to advance food sovereignty and regenerate forests in the face of extractive threats. 

Feminist movements have been thinking about how to relate to the land and each other differently for a long time. We see this through the Beijing Declaration of Indigenous women 1995, Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, 2010 and in September 2015, the Indigenous Women of the Americas signed a Defend Mother Earth Treaty against extractive industry. It stated that:

“While opposing extractive industries, women human rights defenders are advancing alternative economic and social models based on the stewardship of land and common resources in order to preserve life, thereby contributing to the emergence of new paradigms”.

This resistance to extractivism is making a systematic critique and calling for a move away from growth-orientated capitalist and extractivist based models. Feminist movements against extractivism demonstrate the power of collective action and solidarity, pushing back against the neoliberalisation of environmentalism that reduces action to individual lifestyle changes. Feminist approaches mean revaluing care and embedding it into all our relationships, with each other, human and non-human. Central is valuing relationships and different ways of relating. Indigenous feminist scholar activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson highlights that: “The alternative to extractivism is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local”. These alternative visions of non-extractive relationship building exist in movements that say no to mining and yes to life. 

Conclusions

Applying a gender perspective to all injustices from extractivism, from mining projects to supply chains, to resistance movements is important. Not all women are the same, an intersectional lens is key to understand the different ways women are impacted and resist. Beyond women as passive victims or romanticised saviours we need to understand how specific contexts shape the gendered impacts of extractivism. Women are the most impacted by extractive development, not because of inherent vulnerability, but because of systems, like colonialism and capitalist patriarchy position them as caregivers and enforce structural inequalities. 

Feminist perspectives highlight systemic change is needed, not technofixes, green extractivism or green growth; alternative economic models that centre on care and the wellbeing of people and planet are crucial. The struggle to dismantle patriarchy and advance gender justice is not an “add on” but must be part of our movement to resist extractivism globally. 

Author

This position paper was prepared by Dr V’cenza Cirefice, member of CAIM, on behalf of and in collaboration with Yes to Life No to Mining.