3 Gender: Navigating a Male-Dominated Space

From the 1970s onwards, however, mineworkers in the Central African Copperbelt were confronted with declining wages and social welfare services. Although Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines) and Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) largely endorsed the gender ideology promoted by colonial mining companies and Christian mission, the conditions they offered to mineworkers no longer allowed them to develop a ‘modern’ family lifestyle (Ferguson 1999; Dibwe 2001; Mususa 2010; Rubbers 2015). A growing number of women began to engage in income-generating activities such as gardening, trade, or beer brewing to contribute to family budgets. With the deterioration of their living conditions in the 1980s and 1990s, households came to increasingly depend on these activities for their daily needs, and model of the modern family was gradually put into question (Henk 1988; Ferguson 1999; Rubbers 2015).

Besides those who developed income-generating activities in agriculture or trade, a minority of women – who have largely remained unnoticed by previous scholars writing on gender in the Central African Copperbelt – worked in the mining industry. In 1976, the percentage of women employed by Gécamines and ZCCM was 4.5 and 4 per cent respectively (Rapports annuels de la Gécamines, 1969–99; ZCCM labour reports, 1964–97; see Lando 1978; Munene 2018; Dibwe 2019). Most worked in subaltern positions such as secretaries, nurses, cleaners, or cooks. Only a few, generally with a middle-class background, were in executive or middle management positions. Most were employed in administration or in the companies’ social institutions such as schools or hospitals. As Dibwe (2019: 4; our translation) notes about Gécamines, ‘the exploitation and production sector remains until now the prerogative of men’. Although this is certainly not specific to the Central African Copperbelt (see Gier and Mercier 2006), this division of labour reflected widely held assumptions about the characteristic features of men and women in the area.

Over the course of the last two decades, with the growth of the urban population, the decline of state-owned mining enterprises and the establishment of new foreign mining companies, the proportion of women on the labour market seems to have increased. Although most women remain active in the informal economy – including artisanal mining, where their share is estimated at 30–50 per cent (World Bank 2017) – a growing number have sought formal employment. The increasingly visible presence of women in wage employment more generally has not gone unnoticed. On social media, it has become commonplace to see memes ridiculing the declining power of the man in a couple circulating among friends.

The mining sector has not escaped this broader trend. Although new foreign mining investors do not hesitate to dismiss workers and offer fewer social benefits than their predecessors, the jobs they advertise are still seen as stable and well-paid compared to those offered by most national firms. As a result, a growing number of women, especially those with higher education degrees, try their luck with these companies. This is all the more so since a growing number of mining companies claim to be committed to gender diversity and to give preference to female candidates: for instance, some companies in Congo mentions in their job advertisements that ‘Women’s applications are given high priority’ (our translation). Indeed, gender equality campaigns have progressively found their way into the mining sector and new foreign investors feel increasingly under pressure to conform with Western corporate ethical standards. In the Central African Copperbelt, this is especially true of companies that are part of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), an international organisation that champions the Corporate Social Responsibility movement in the global mining industry.

To date, however, women represent less than 10 per cent of the workforce of most mining companies in both countries (World Bank 2017).1 In contrast to South Africa (Benya 2016: 7), Congo and Zambia have not adopted affirmative action policies compelling mining companies to speed up the inclusion of women. Thus the number of female employees in a mining company largely depends on its own commitment to gender equality and the pressure exerted by local civil society organisations. There are several reasons for this. Most girls are discouraged to take scientific and technical subjects at school and university. Thus, although it has increased, the number of women applying for jobs in the mining sector remains limited. Secondly, recruitment committees are usually composed only of men. In a region marked by a high unemployment rate, where a man’s honour is defined by his ability to provide for his family, to hire a woman in a mining company is considered by many as a waste, as it deprives men of job opportunities. While some households have two salaries, others have no stable source of income. Consequently, women not only have a lower likelihood of being hired at all, they are also the first to be dismissed. Finally, executive managers themselves may prioritise male workers to avoid interruptions in the production process caused by pregnancy and women’s family obligations. This explanation was provided – among others – by Regina, one of the few female managers to run a subcontracting firm in the Zambian copperbelt: ‘Women are not as productive as men. They have a lot of responsibility. A lot of days off, looking after the husband who is sick today, tomorrow the child, the other day funeral. Mining does not work like that.’

A small but significant change associated with the development of new mining projects is that some women now work as mechanics, loader drivers or dump truck operators in core functions such as processing, maintenance or mining. Their number is small, however. As in the past, most of the women who find employment in these projects work in auxiliary departments and services (human resources, finance, administration, social, hospital, canteen, cleaning, etc.). In both countries, their presence underground remains strictly regulated: in Congo it is prohibited for women to work in this environment; in Zambia, they are only authorised to perform non-manual work and must be accompanied by a man while underground.2 Following the legislative changes to allow women to work underground, three women were recruited to work underground at Kopala mine, where Musonda did fieldwork. While it is still generally accepted that, as in many mining countries, women’s bodies must be protected from the dangers of underground work, this excludes women from wage increases and bonuses offered to workers in the production departments based on the company’s performance. All mineworkers know that such bonuses make a significant difference in what they get at the end of the month.3 In Congo, although women cannot benefit from this underground bonus, a law promulgated in July 2016 allows them to work at night, and hence to receive the bonus for night work.

All this indicates that various initiatives have been formally taken to facilitate women’s inclusion in the mining sector. While states introduced legal changes to allow women to work at night (in Congo) or underground (in Zambia), some mining companies advertised female-friendly jobs, set up shorter shifts for breastfeeding mothers, or simply put up posters showing women in company uniforms. Nevertheless, the situation for female workers has only changed slightly. Women working on these projects remain few and far between, and most are assigned to positions that are not essential to the functioning of the mines. Worse still, in Congo, the emergence of subcontracting in the industry has strongly impacted on women. Many who once worked for mining companies now work for subcontracting companies, which offer them fewer stable jobs and lower wages. In cleaning and catering firms, their number can reach half of the workforce. In the Zambian copperbelt, the situation is different because the bulk of the workforce is employed in underground mining operations. The development of subcontracting in this country has thus affected men more than women.

This reproduction of women’s position in the workplace must be understood in the light of the gender ideology that was promoted by mining companies in the twentieth century, which professed that women had to be obedient to men, that their place was at home, and that their role was to take care of children. As Acker (1990: 152) argues, ‘the ranking of women’s jobs is often justified on the basis of women’s identification with childbearing and domestic life’. Even in the masculine domain of the mines, women are generally expected to perform a woman’s job. As this quote from Sandra, a Congolese executive secretary, suggests, female mineworkers internalise and reproduce these normative expectations while being keenly aware that: ‘Bosses prefer people who do not contradict and women usually do not. […] Men like to control, and women are used to being controlled. That is why women are well employed in administrative positions or as secretaries taking care of the boss’ practical stuff.’

These differences in terms of job position and education level are connected to the ways in which our informants talked about their decision to work. Those at the top of the hierarchy (the first category) tend to downplay the importance of money and to highlight their personal aspirations, while the women in the second and third categories mostly emphasise the need for work and responsibility towards their family. For Maria, a young Zambian technician working underground, it is the passion for the job, the competition with men and the desire for climbing the social ladder that has prompted her to embark on this career. This thirst for success and recognition, she said, must be understood in the light of her childhood. She is one of two children brought up by a single mother. The difficulties she faced as a child pushed her to develop masculine behaviours: ‘During my childhood, I did literally everything boys did. I herded cattle, sold fruits at the market, and worked in the fields to help my mother to raise money for my young brother and me’. Upon completing secondary school, she got interested in rock mechanics and decided to pursue it as a career. Her passion bore fruit when, in her final year at university, she won a competition sponsored by a mining company and was offered a job.

For Rose, a 35-year-old woman who works as a geologist in an underground mine in Zambia, the salary is important as she has to provide for a household comprising her mother, her daughter and herself. But money is not everything. As with some other women from mining families, she developed an early interest in the world of mining thanks to her father, a ZCCM geologist: ‘I always admired my father’s boots and overalls every time he came back from work. He told me a lot about the underground, and it is like I knew what the underground looked like even before I started work.’ As for Maria, competition with men also played a role when she started studying geology at university: ‘When a guy performed well,’ she explained, ‘I also wanted to do better, that is how I managed to finish with excellent grades.’

Responsibility towards the children and the family is an aspect that was more frequently brought up by the women in the second and third categories. For Gisèle, a Congolese technician who holds a degree from a local university, working for a mining company was less a choice than a family necessity: ‘If I had a good husband that takes care of my children and me’, she said, ‘I would not work. […] I work because I need it, but I would like to rest and take care of my children.’ Gisèle is married with two children but her husband, who is never at home, does not earn enough to fully provide for the family. This is why she started to work for a mining company, a choice that brings her some satisfaction: she is proud of having been selected among many candidates and she feels respected by her peers. Finally, she now has the means to provide for her family and to occasionally assist a relative or neighbour. However, as the quote above makes explicit, being a miner is not her ambition. She would prefer to stay at home and take care of her children. As she confided to Pugliese, to satisfy this ambition, she would like to find a new husband who can perform the role of breadwinner properly.

The same goes for Huguette, a 40-year-old Congolese woman, who had a difficult career before finding a job in a mining company. She struggled to obtain a secondary school diploma, and she could not afford to continue her studies due to economic problems and early pregnancies. During her life, she has had several jobs. In the mining sector, she first worked in different subcontracting catering companies and then obtained a contract working in logistics at a mining company. ‘Everything I did,’ she says, ‘was for my family, and if I think about where I come from and the difficulties and humiliation I experienced as a single mother, I think I took the right decision. Now my children can study and have the life that I would have always wanted.’ For her, however, the job that she currently holds is not the end of the story. It is a means to achieve her dream, opening a private kindergarten. But to save up enough money she has to work for a few more years.

As we can see from these stories, women describe different motivations to account for their decision to work for a mining company. It has to do, to varying extents, with their passion for the job itself, their aspirations for economic independence and social mobility, and their responsibilities as mothers. In all cases, the ways in which they present their motivations shows the centrality of gender norms, which unfold in different directions depending on the job position and level of education. Gender norms strongly influence their aspirations, the forms of dependence in which they find themselves and the responsibilities that they consider theirs. Such discourses, however, are not sufficient to account for their experience of the mine as a gendered workplace. In the next section, we study the challenges they face in this masculine environment and the strategies they put in place to deal with them.

Second, women are subject to strict restrictions about certain types of jobs such as those involving manual tasks underground. In the Zambian mine, despite the legal changes to allow women to work underground, restrictions persist. As already noted only three women, Rose, Maria and Beatrice are authorised to work underground. To obtain this authorisation required their employer to make a request to the government’s mine safety department. According to the law, this request must stipulate that all the necessary measures to accommodate women in this environment have been taken, such as toilets for women, separate changing rooms, and a male escort while underground, etc. As explained above, the decision to open mine access to women is connected to transnational initiatives for equal rights and to the companies’ own concern with their corporate image. But this opening is strongly constrained by legal provisions which continue to be justified by the imperative to protect women. This justification is generally well-accepted by male mineworkers. As a company manager explained, ‘women’s bodies cannot withstand the environment underground for a long time. So we need to specify where they work and for how long.’

Third, if women want children, they know that pregnancies can impose on them difficult choices and have a strong impact on their career. While this affects working women generally, it is, once again, especially the case for women working in the mines, whether underground or on the surface. Under both Congolese and Zambian law, due to the intrinsic hazards of the mines, pregnant women cannot be employed in this environment irrespective of the nature of the job. One of our respondents in Zambia, who was trained as a heavy-duty mechanic, explained that she lost a job opportunity in the mines because she became pregnant (the pregnancy test she took as part of the recruitment process was positive). After she gave birth, she failed to find another opportunity in the mines and she was therefore forced to retrain as a nurse: ‘It was easier to get a job as a nurse than to get a manly job.’

As previously noted, when mining companies restructure their operations and/or organise mass layoffs, women are usually the first to lose their jobs. When Grace, a loader truck operator, came back from maternity leave in 2015, the downturn in copper prices led her employer to restructure its operations, and Grace and her fellow female colleagues were excluded from the mine site. Six were retrenched while she and three other women were assigned to the information desk. Her job now involved monitoring the production process underground via cameras. While management justified this action as a cost-cutting measure affecting all workers, the women saw it as a discriminatory practice based on gender. This opinion is shared by Cynthia, a Congolese mine employee who lost her job in 2016. As she put it, ‘they prefer to keep men or people who have a family and just one salary. As if, when you do not have one, you were less responsible, and you do not need a job. People ask you: “What are you going to do with the money if you do not have a family?”’

Finally, women working in mining may experience derogatory comments made by colleagues. Like many other women interviewed in Congo, Rachelle, a HR officer, feels that men do not always consider women in the workplace as colleagues, but as sexual partners or housewives: ‘At work,’ she said, ‘men always desire women or think that women are there for cooking and not for work in mining […] They are curious, they harass you, they ask you to marry them just to have fun. In the bus, if you are not well dressed, they judge you.’ Rumours about women workers may be spread as much by their female as by their male colleagues. In Congolese mines, where women are already ‘out of place’, rumours are rife about women workers who are alleged to have obtained their positions by flirting or having sexual intercourse with male supervisors.

To cope with these challenges, women express their agency by developing various strategies. Like many in high and mid-level positions, Rachelle insists on the importance for women of obtaining men’s respect. To do so, women have to work hard – harder than men – and put some limits on the jokes and comments that male colleagues can make: ‘Some colleagues need to be guided to understand when joking goes too far. You can laugh twice; the third time you say that you need respect.’ In her view, it also involves putting aside gossiping and vanity, which she sees as their ‘feminine part’, to focus on the job.

This view is part of a broader strategy among women which consists of adopting so-called masculine traits (e.g. hard work, assertiveness, courage, indifference to dirt, propensity to joke with colleagues) in order to prove their ability to work on an equal footing with men. Our informants frequently stressed that they were recruited on the basis of their skills, not because of their physical attractiveness or sexual availability. Among them, only Huguette confided to us that she had had a love affair with a male supervisor at the beginning of her career: ‘We have to fight with what we have,’ she said. ‘If we do not, we will not have any promotions, and we will just experience marginalisation.’ Since women adopting masculine behaviour can be regarded with suspicion, it is important for them to not push it too far. This is a limit that Jessica, a female heavy truck driver, learned to delineate from experience: ‘Sometimes I forgot the way I was working, and I behaved like a man […] Men have a complex if women work, especially if they are better qualified than they are. To avoid harassment, I try to become friends and never make men feel less important.’ To gain their male colleagues’ respect and avoid troubles, women have to be careful not to humiliate them, and show that they comply with expected feminine behaviours by being faithful and dedicated wives at home.

In Zambia, the experience of the three female underground workers suggests that women can also draw upon their position of hierarchical superiority and mutual dependency with their male team members to cope with negative stereotypes. On the one hand, the three women relied on their crews to get the work done, achieve targets and hence get favourable performance assessments. On the other, the male miners depended on them for work assignments, rewards, breaks, recommendations for promotions and wage increases, technical knowledge and skills, and for possible protection during retrenchment. Interactions at work revolved mainly around production, safety and job security, and the importance of these concerns tended to obscure gender difference in significant ways. The successful integration of these women underground was thus based neither on the adoption of male behaviour nor on open resistance to male domination. Rather, these women attempted to neutralise gender differences by emphasising the demands of work or to reconfigure them differently by redefining work interactions in the language of the family (for a similar observation, see Rolston 2014: 8–10). In the latter case they came to assume a feminine role, that of a ‘mother’ or ‘sister’, but one that gives them authority over their co-workers.

In this view, which endorses the gendered division of labour promoted by mining companies in the past, a woman’s role is primarily that of wife and mother, not of breadwinner. If the family is in need, a married woman may engage in informal economic activities to supplement her husband’s income but in this case the main concern is that her activities remain under the husband’s sole supervision: men prefer their wives not have other ‘bosses’ in their lives, to prevent potential harassment or cheating. When women work alongside male colleagues under the supervision of other men, as is the case for female mineworkers, they are often the object of suspicion from their husband and in-laws. Female wage workers are frequently blamed by their in-laws of hiding their salary from the husband and playing the role of the boss at home. Many women are reluctant to work in this suspicious environment. Gisèle, who has to work night shifts with men, finds it shameful, as it may place her respectability into question and cause problems at home: ‘A married woman returns home from work at eight in the evening, and has to decide between the house and the job, this is not good. I do not like to work at night; I would rather leave before six.’

In view of such suspicions, it is unsurprising that women are careful to show that they are faithful and dedicated wives. Bernadette, a Congolese technician, told us that it was crucial for her to be recognised not just as a competent worker but as a subservient wife, who takes care of the needs of her husband. To show her love and affection, every day when she comes back from work, she is keen to enact a sort of marital ritual in which her husband waits for her, sitting on the couch, and asks her to take off his shoes:

Our research tends to suggest that women’s wage employment is more widely accepted in Zambia than in Congo. As Musonda (2020: 38) finds elsewhere, men are not as ashamed of having working wives as they were in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. For these families, economic security is a more important determinant of a man’s or a woman’s position than gender difference. As such, men generally prefer to marry women who are in a position to work, or to develop a business, and to generate some income. As one of his friends told Musonda, ‘it is suicidal to marry a woman who just sits at home and wait for your salary. A woman should bring something to the table.’ If they do not marry a woman who is already working, many mineworkers are ready to pay to have their wives trained as teachers, nurses or safety officers. This increased recognition of women’s economic role accords with recent findings on the Zambian Copperbelt which show women as breadwinners (Mususa 2010; Evans 2016). This is uncommon in Congo, where most men prefer that their wives stay at home or engage only in informal economic activities. If they pay for training it is for themselves, to improve their own employability, not for their wives to get jobs.

Problems can sometimes arise when women earn higher salaries then their husbands, as we saw in the story of Rita, a female mineworker whose wage is twice or thrice that of her husband. Like many other women, the fact that she works full time does not relieve her of household chores. She wakes up at four in the morning to prepare food and bathwater for her husband, and to get children ready for school. By five-thirty, she is at the bus station to go to the mine site and work until six in the evening. Given her difficult job in the mines, she usually returns home exhausted. Soon after she got her job, she hired a maid to help her at home, but this did not please her husband. A crisis broke out one day when she was so tired she could not cook for the husband. ‘I cannot eat bread,’ he said. ‘What type of woman are you if you cannot cook for your husband?’ He reminded her of her duties and called a meeting with her parents. During this meeting, he expressed what he saw as a lack of respect, and associated it with her new employment: ‘it is a woman’s responsibility to cook fresh meals for her husband regardless of her employment status. A man’s pride is in the dish his wife cooks.’1 Similar statements on food as a key medium of marriage and kinship are found in Congo. As noted by Mottiaux and Petit (2004: 189; our translation), a common expression in Congo is: ‘a wife must know how to “treat” [cook for] her husband if she wants to keep him’.

As Silberschmidt (1999: 7) argues, the failure of men to fulfil sociocultural expectations to provide, which in large part constitute their ‘social value, identity, and sense of self-esteem’, threatens their authority and in some cases reduces their role in the household to that of ‘figureheads’. In the case of Rita’s husband, his feeling of losing control finds expression in accusations of disrespect and infidelity: ‘Sometimes’, Rita told Musonda, ‘when there is no food at home and I ask my friends to give me some money, he would not eat the food protesting that it may have come from my boyfriends.’ Issues of jealousy and infidelity are well documented in the anthropological literature on the Central African Copperbelt (Powdermarker 1962; Epstein 1981; Ferguson 1999). Unsurprisingly, such issues are resurfacing in the context of the mining boom, with the increase in women’s employment and the development of social media. Thus Linda, a warehouse worker, reported:

The legacy of industrial paternalism, which contributed to promoting a family model based on a clear division of roles between men and women, is still very strong in the Central African Copperbelt. This does not mean, however, that this gendered model has had the same implications on both sides of the Copperbelt. Our research suggests that the legacy of this gender ideology is stronger in Congo than in Zambia because paternalism in Congo was adopted earlier, and became more total. The family policy was also more central to UMHK and Gécamines’ social policy than in RST, RAA, or ZCCM. The current economic situation in the two countries is another reason for the variations in gender roles within the Central African Copperbelt: the cost of living and housing is higher in Zambian cities and Zambian families face a greater struggle to live on a single wage compared to Congolese families. In Zambia, women’s desire to work receives more and more support from husbands; some men are even ready to participate in domestic chores to enable their wives to work and earn money.

Nevertheless, in both countries, a growing number of women obtain higher education degrees and look for work, including in the mining sector. This is due to a combination of factors. The challenges for the male breadwinners to provide for their families amidst high unemployment, widespread job losses and declining wages, have driven more women into the labour market to ensure the survival of their families. To some extent, this trend has been supported by gender equality policies and campaigns. In both countries, some of the legal restrictions on women’s employment have been lifted, and although concrete and binding policy measures have not been implemented to support women’s work (e.g. in recruitment processes or work–life balance), the rhetoric of economic gender equality has become increasingly present in institutional discourse and the media. In the mining sector, the active involvement of some mining companies in promoting gender equality has also had an impact: a greater female presence and better working conditions are generally more guaranteed in the large mining projects committed to ICMM mining principles. Finally, women themselves have helped to actively drive the feminisation of mining by taking advantage of emerging opportunities. Given the economic prominence of mining in the Central African Copperbelt, this sector was and continues to be an obvious choice, both for educated women looking for work matching their qualifications, and less educated women seeking financial security. Today, women occupy job positions that were once exclusively occupied by men and some supervise entire teams, services and departments composed of men. Proud to play such a role in society, the female mineworkers we met were, at the same time, increasingly aware of the discriminations they face in everyday life.

Few of our informants are ready to openly oppose these discriminations or join a struggle for women’s rights. Instead, they express their agency by adopting various tactics in order to work and earn a living without compromising male authority in public (Scott 1990; see Hodgson and McCurdy 2001; Rolston 2014; Rubbers 2015). At work, they can adopt – within certain limits – so-called masculine behavioural traits to gain respect from their male colleagues or assume a feminine role, that of a ‘mother’ or ‘sister’, giving them authority over their co-workers. At home, their room for manoeuvre is more limited: they must play, and sometimes overplay, their role of housewives if they do not want to stir up their husband’s jealousy, and possibly end up divorced from him. Indeed, being a miner and a housewife are roles that can be difficult to reconcile. At the same time, their interaction leads to something new. As Lindsay and Miescher (2003: 7) suggest, gender identities that are experienced and performed differently depending on the context contribute to the reproduction or transformation of gender systems. More specifically, in the Central African Copperbelt, having female employees in mining companies means that women participate to a greater extent both in the countries’ economies and in contributing to household finances; sometimes they even become the main breadwinners. This enables them to have more decision-making authority and room for manoeuvre in accommodating new gender dynamics within the family and society at large. Moreover, in terms of changing societal values, having female employees in the mining sector and especially in production-related departments, has the added value of disrupting the idea of women’s work as occurring only within female-coded sectors. Indeed, traditional gender roles are challenged when women hold a high position in the male-dominated mining sector and perform tasks considered primarily masculine because of the harsh, dangerous, dirty labour they entail. Depending on the job, women renegotiate prevailing gender norms: the higher the position at work and the greater the economic security, the more women emphasise their independence, even at home. Likewise, men are usually more inclined to share authority in the household when women are economically successful. These gender dynamics do not completely break down past norms and values, but reinvent them in line with men’s and women’s new aspirations and forms of interaction.