PDF- If the extractive industries are to deliver on their aim of contributing to sustainable development, it is vital that they work to realise women’s rights and gender equality. A gender impact assessment is a tool that can help them do just that. By undertaking gender impact assessments, mining, oil and gas companies can:
• ensure that their activities respect the rights of women and men;
• promote women’s empowerment and participation in community decision-making processes;
• identify and mitigate potential impacts; and
• increase the benefits of mining, oil and gas projects.
A gender impact assessment can also help companies to gain and maintain a “social licence to operate” with impacted
communities and avoid conflict and costly shut-downs. While some progress has been made in recent years, the
extractive industries continue to undermine women’s rights and contribute to gender inequality, which hampers the development potential of the sector. Oxfam’s work shows that large-scale mining, oil and gas projects affect women and men differently, and that women often bear the brunt of the negative impacts.This is because the roles that women and men play vary in all societies, the assets that they can claim as their own differ and the rights they enjoy are not the same. These gendered divisions make women more vulnerable to changes caused by large-scale projects. For example, women’s roles in many remote and rural communities mean that they are more dependent than men on resources such as water, food, forest products (medicinal plants for example), fodder and fuel wood found in the local environment. Women also tend to receive few, if any, of the direct benefits of large-scale mining, oil and gas projects, such as compensation for land or employment. As such, the extractive industries often create — and exacerbate existing — gender inequalities in the communities that host them.
