IWIM Photo Campaign

Open to all women in mining

Launched in 2014 | Competition in 2017 | Touring Exhibition 2018-2019 | IDWIM 2022 | IDWIM 2023 | IDWIM 2024 “I am Mining” + Photo Competition

Objectives

  • Publicise accurate depictions of women working in mining
  • Showcase the amazing variety of roles in which women are employed in mining
  • Reflect the growing number of women working in, around and with mining
  • Provide younger women with strong role models
  • Allow families, friends and stakeholders to understand women’s working conditions
  • Support a change in cultural perceptions of women in mining in a male-dominated industry

How it started

This initiative started from a simple realisation: for a long time, even women in mining (WIM) organisations, including IWIM, had trouble finding strong, positive images of women in mining to support their visibility and awareness campaigns. This was also the case for other stakeholders and supporters of the gender parity, diversity and inclusion agenda.

IWIM’s efforts to gather images over the years increased steadily until 2017, when they were boosted by the organisation of a photo competition which attracted significant attention from global businesses, industry associations and international organisations pursuing similar transformation goals in extractives and/or other industrial sectors.

The IWIM Photo Campaign operates a library of high-quality images, which are used to increase awareness of how many women work across all disciplines of the sector and to share important visual stories that celebrate women in mining. To ensure that such positive images are available to all stakeholders, they are made available on request, as stock images under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Photo Gallery

View photos submitted by women working in the mining sector from across the years here.

Photo Competition

Find out more about the 2017 Photo Competition

Find out more about the 2024 Photo Competition

UnEarth Photo Exhibition

In 2018, 40 entries from the photo competition submissions were chosen and turned into panels for a travelling photo exhibition. The Unearth Photo Exhibition was seen at conferences like Mining Indaba in 2018 and PDAC in 2019 and has also been to other countries: Mongolia, Solomon Islands, Chile, USA and Indonesia. Find out more

Send us Pictures of yourselves in action!

We call upon all women in mining to share photos of yourselves, along with your name, job title, employer, photo location and brief description of its context. This combination will tell a story, providing a powerful narrative to enhance the photo’s effect: this is one way for women to change the image, discourse and perception of a male-dominated industry.

Submit a photo

Submit a photo of yourself for our photo campaign

  • Drop files here or
    Accepted file types: jpg, gif, png, Max. file size: 10 MB.
      Please share your photo in JPG, PNG formats preferably
    • If student or currently unemployed write that into the field
    • Please share a brief description of the photo's context including where and when the photo was taken. This combination will tell a story, providing a powerful narrative to enhance the photo’s effect: this is one way for women to change the image, discourse and perception of a male-dominated industry.
    • Please share your LinkedIn profile and other social media handles if you have any
    • Please state that you give us permission to store and use your photo on social media, our website, in brochures or other collateral for the purposes of highlighting women in mining. Please write the statement: "I give permission to my photo being stored and used by IWiM" and add your name after it as a form of signature.

    The IWiM Photo Campaign operates a library of high-quality images, which are used to increase awareness of how many women work across all disciplines of the sector and to share important visual stories that celebrate women in mining.

    To ensure that such positive images are available to all stakeholders, these are available for upon request subject to intended use under a creative commons licence requiring attribution but not allowing any derivatives or commercial use. 

    The photos on our website are all rights reserved. Please respect the privacy of our contributors and refrain from downloading without written permission.

    References in the photo captions to particular companies are for information purposes only. IWiM is not sponsored or approved by, or associated or otherwise affiliated with, any of the companies referred to in the captions.