INTERNATIONAL WOMEN IN MINING AND BRIDGING THE GENDER GAP
in the industry , beginning with Malawi and Sierra Leone . The goal of the project is to support the economic empowerment of women through their increased engagement in the mining sector .
Two of the biggest initiatives and programmes from IWiM are the Women on Board programme and an initiative to get more “ realistic ” women in mining stock imagery representing women who actually work in mining . The stock imagery Campaign was born out of a lack of visibility of professional women in mining roles within stock images , on annual reports of mining companies , sector presentations , company offices & websites etc . Instead when you found stock photos of women they were models . “ Some are scantily dressed in stereotypically sexist poses that are simply counter intuitive to all the things we are trying to improve the mining industry ,” says Dischinger . “ Our first photo campaign in 2014 saw over 50 women participate and send in photos of them in their work environment and some have been released for sale as stock images . We will launch a new photo campaign this January ,” says Dischinger .
Another project relates to Women on Boards . The goal of the Women on Mining Boards programme is simple : to provide the opportunity for women who are interested in working at a board level to learn more about how to get there .
The process would normally require education at an institute of directors , but this is often an expensive process and may be geographically inaccessible . Through a webinar programme , IWiM looked to remove those barriers .
“ We wanted to set up an affordable programme which would be accessible everywhere , with speakers from the mining sector and we wanted the women to be able to ask questions and engage ,” says Dischinger .
Our next initiative for Women on Mining Boards is , a database full of talented “ board ready ” women from all over the world as a source of candidates for mining companies . For more information on IWiM and how you can get involved , visit www . internationalwim . org
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