A Mine of One’s Own?

This chapter explores the idea of change as it relates to gender norms and women’s economic empowerment (WEE) and, more specifically, the importance of seeing gender norms as changing and changeable. It considers authority structures and institutions as contexts shaping gender norms and their navigation by women working in artisanal and small-scale mining. The research for this chapter comes from a mixed methods study of women’s livelihoods in six artisanal and small-scale mine (ASM) sites, two in each of Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. ASM is a type of mining using limited mechanisation but with high labour inputs. Building from an analysis of gender norms as shaping women’s mining livelihoods at these sites, this chapter focuses more specifically on the authority structures that delimit WEE as overlooked contexts in which gender norms (and their changeability) take on particular valence.