Mining companies and gender(ed) policies: The women of the Congolese Copperbelt, past and present

Mining companies of the past and present have promoted specific roles for men women through their management practices. In DR Congo, first colonial then state-owned naturalised role as employees breadwinners. At same time, were assigned responsibility reproduction understood being financially dependent on men's salary, either that fathers or husbands. By contrast, some LSM (large-scale mining) today support gender equality programmes, mainly to improve corporate reputation. Drawing literature in industrial extractive sector elsewhere world, I show how these discourses processes continue produce Congolese Copperbelt mines masculine spaces at different levels. move ethnographic component paper by arguing new investors’ practices policies are not easily implemented area. On contrary, they confront a region marked paternalistic social mining past, which entrenched certain hegemony. Through biographies involved present, effects companies’ Haut-Katanga Province.