Ensuring gender equality

Gender inequality combined with corruption leads to gendered impacts.

Corruption can have a disproportionate and unique impact on women in mining host communities, including their involvement in community consultations, decisions, and activities related to mining projects, by exacerbating the inequality that women already experience.

Evidence from Transparency International Australia’s Accountable Mining Programme shows that women’s views and needs are often not adequately considered in mining consultations, despite gender-differentiated impacts.

Women, particularly those in remote or rural areas where mining takes place, are often in a disadvantaged position because of unequal gender and power relations, lack of access to and control of land and economic resources, and because of entrenched discrimination.

Women’s participation is critical to combatting corruption

Women have a significant role in preventing and addressing corruption and actively contributing to helping their communities. Strengthening women’s voice and agency improves accountability and can reduce corruption risks in decision-making.

Understanding how corruption in the mining industry affects genders and supporting women’s efforts in combating corruption is crucial for ensuring a more just, equitable, and transparent process for everyone in their communities.

Our priorities

Empower women to hold extractive and energy transition sector actors to account, including to seek redress.

Support women, men, youth, indigenous people, communities and CSOs to utilise TI tools, resources and forums, to access information, engage with key stakeholders, conduct advocacy, participate in decision making and provide leadership in preventing corruption relating to the extractive, infrastructure and/or energy transition sectors.

Increase the knowledge and understanding of women, men, youth, indigenous people, communities and CSOs of the importance of, risks to, and solutions for transparency and good governance in the extractive, infrastructure and energy transition sectors.

Gender in the MACRA tool

Transparency International’s Accountable Mining programme developed the Mining Awards Corruption Risk Assessment Tool (MACRA Tool) to identify and assess the underlying causes of corruption in the process of awarding mining rights.

The latest edition mainstreams gender throughout, helping users of the tool analyse the corruption risks from a gendered perspective.

The tool guides users to collect information that will help identify, understand and address the barriers to women’s participation caused by gender inequality, and identify and mitigate the specific gendered impacts of corruption on women.

Chapter insights

Transparency International chapters have been working with women and women’s groups to tackle gender inequality and support women to express their voice and agency in decisions about mining projects. This series of stories provides a snapshot of their work, shares their impact and provides useful insights.

Key resource

Our briefing paper explores the link between gender and corruption in mining sector licensing.

Looking at community consultation processes, the experience of female artisanal miners, whistleblowers, and community members, it discusses the gendered impacts of corruption and highlights the need to tackle gender inequality and support women’s voice and participation.

The paper provides recommendations for governments, mining companies and civil society to support them to design and implement measures to reduce gender inequality and corruption within the mining sector and minimise the gendered impacts of corruption.