Gem Trade and Women's Empowerment

Participation, leadership, and equity across the gemstone and jewellery value chain

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Women have always been present in the gem and jewellery trade — as miners, sorters, cutters, traders, designers, and consumers — yet their economic participation has rarely translated into proportionate ownership, decision-making authority, or financial security. Over the past three decades, a convergence of fair-trade certification movements, international development programmes, industry-led initiatives, and grassroots cooperatives has begun to address this structural imbalance. Organisations including the International Coloured Gemstone Association (ICA), UN Women, Pact, and the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) have documented both the scale of women's contribution to the gem sector and the barriers that prevent that contribution from generating lasting economic empowerment. The result is a growing body of field-tested programmes, policy frameworks, and market mechanisms that are reshaping how the industry understands gender equity — not as a peripheral social concern but as a prerequisite for responsible and sustainable supply chains.

Women in the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Sector

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) accounts for the majority of coloured gemstone production worldwide. The International Labour Organization estimates that ASM globally employs between 40 and 100 million people, with women comprising a significant and often undercounted share. In East Africa — particularly Tanzania, Kenya, Madagascar, and Zambia — women represent a substantial proportion of the workforce at ruby, sapphire, tanzanite, and tourmaline operations. In South Asia, women work extensively in the gem-processing sectors of Sri Lanka and India. In Latin America, women are active at emerald, amethyst, and tourmaline sites in Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia.

Their roles are diverse but tend to cluster at specific points in the value chain. Women predominate in surface washing and sorting of rough material, in the transport and domestic processing of ore, and in small-scale trading at local markets. They are less commonly found in the more physically demanding and higher-earning roles of underground extraction, and are significantly underrepresented in cutting and polishing workshops, wholesale trading, and export-level commerce. This concentration in lower-value activities is not merely a reflection of physical labour requirements; it is reinforced by legal, cultural, and financial structures that limit women's access to mining licences, land tenure, credit facilities, and formal market networks.

Pact's MINES To Market programme, which has operated across sub-Saharan Africa, documented that women in ASM communities frequently lack formal title to the land they work, making it difficult to access institutional credit or to benefit from any formalisation of mining rights. In Tanzania, for example, customary land tenure systems have historically vested land rights in male household heads, leaving women miners in a position of informal dependency even when they are the primary economic contributors at a given site.

Structural Barriers to Equitable Participation

The barriers facing women in the gem trade are well-documented across multiple research programmes and are broadly consistent across geographies, though their precise form varies by cultural and legal context.

Land and licence access: Mining licences and prospecting rights are disproportionately granted to men, partly because formal registration systems require collateral or documentation that women are less likely to hold, and partly because customary norms in many producing communities do not recognise women as independent economic actors.
Access to capital: Microfinance penetration in mining communities remains uneven. Women are more likely to rely on informal credit arrangements — often from male traders or mine operators — that create dependency relationships and erode their bargaining power over rough material prices.
Technical training: Lapidary training, gemological education, and business-management courses have historically been directed at male participants. Where women have accessed such training, the results in terms of income and market positioning have been demonstrably positive, suggesting that the gap is one of access rather than aptitude.
Safety and health: Women in ASM face specific occupational hazards, including exposure to mercury in gold-associated operations, physical risks in open-pit environments, and — critically — elevated vulnerability to gender-based violence at and around mining sites. The ILO and Human Rights Watch have both documented the prevalence of sexual violence as a tool of economic coercion in some ASM contexts.
Market information asymmetry: Women traders and miners frequently lack access to current price information, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by intermediaries who purchase rough material at prices far below market value. Mobile technology programmes that disseminate price data have shown measurable impact in narrowing this gap.

Industry-Led Initiatives and Certification Frameworks

The International Coloured Gemstone Association, through its Gem Responsible Sourcing programme and its engagement with the CIBJO (the World Jewellery Confederation) responsible sourcing framework, has increasingly incorporated gender equity criteria into its guidance for member companies. The ICA's work in Tanzania and other producing countries has supported community development projects that specifically target women's economic participation, including training in gem evaluation and cooperative business structures.

The Alliance for Responsible Mining's Fairmined standard — applicable to gold but influential as a model for the broader ASM sector — includes explicit gender equity requirements. Certified operations must demonstrate that women have equal access to membership in mining organisations, equal pay for equivalent work, and freedom from gender-based discrimination. ARM has published guidance on how these principles can be adapted to coloured gemstone cooperatives, and several tanzanite and ruby cooperatives in East Africa have drawn on this framework.

The Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC), whose Code of Practices is audited by accredited third parties, requires member companies to maintain non-discriminatory employment policies and to conduct due diligence on human rights risks — including gender-specific risks — throughout their supply chains. As of the early 2020s, the RJC had over 1,300 member companies, giving its standards significant reach across the midstream and retail segments of the jewellery industry.

UN Women has partnered with private-sector actors and development agencies on programmes that use the gem and jewellery sector as a vehicle for women's economic empowerment more broadly. In Tanzania, a programme supported by UN Women and the government's Women Development Fund targeted women in the tanzanite sector around Mererani, providing business training, savings group structures, and linkages to formal banking. Evaluations of comparable programmes in other extractive sectors have consistently found that structured savings groups combined with market-linkage support produce more durable income gains than training alone.

Women in Gem Cutting, Design, and Retail

The empowerment narrative in the gem trade is not confined to mining. In the cutting and polishing sector, women have historically been employed in large numbers in India — particularly in Surat and Jaipur, which together process the majority of the world's diamonds and a substantial share of coloured stones — but often in lower-skill, lower-wage roles. Initiatives by organisations including the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council of India (GJEPC) have sought to upgrade women's technical skills in lapidary work, with the explicit aim of increasing their earning potential and reducing occupational segregation within workshops.

In jewellery design and retail, women have long been prominent as consumers and increasingly as designers and business owners. The contemporary fine jewellery market features a significant cohort of women designers — including many who have built internationally recognised brands — whose work has reshaped aesthetic conventions and expanded the market for coloured gemstones. Organisations such as Women's Jewelry Association (WJA) in the United States and comparable bodies in Europe and Asia provide mentorship, networking, and advocacy for women at the retail and design end of the value chain.

The rise of direct-to-consumer digital commerce has lowered barriers to entry for women-owned jewellery businesses, enabling designers and small-scale traders to reach global markets without the capital investment previously required for physical retail presence. This structural shift has been particularly significant for artisan jewellers in producing countries, who can now sell directly to international buyers through platforms that provide price transparency and reputational accountability.

Cooperatives as a Structural Solution

Cooperative structures have emerged as one of the most effective mechanisms for translating women's labour into women's ownership and income. In Tanzania's Umba Valley, women's gemstone cooperatives have enabled members to aggregate production, negotiate collectively with buyers, and retain a larger share of the value of rough material. In Madagascar, women's cooperatives at sapphire and tourmaline sites have combined production with savings and credit functions, providing members with access to capital that would otherwise be unavailable.

The cooperative model addresses several of the structural barriers simultaneously: it provides a legal entity through which women can hold collective mining licences; it creates a negotiating counterweight to individual trader relationships; it enables shared investment in equipment and training; and it establishes governance structures that can be designed to ensure women's leadership. Pact's research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania has found that cooperatives with formal gender equity provisions in their constitutions — including reserved leadership positions for women — produce more equitable income distribution than those relying on informal norms alone.

The limitations of the cooperative model should also be acknowledged. Cooperatives require sustained organisational capacity, legal registration, and ongoing governance — all of which demand time and skills that women in subsistence mining communities may struggle to allocate. External support organisations have found that the most durable cooperatives are those that receive multi-year technical assistance rather than short-term project-cycle interventions.

Traceability, Transparency, and the Role of the Consumer Market

The growing consumer demand for traceable, responsibly sourced gemstones has created a market incentive for supply chain transparency that intersects directly with gender equity. Retailers and brands that can document the social conditions at the source of their gemstones — including the treatment of women workers — are increasingly able to command premium prices and differentiate their offerings in a crowded market. This commercial logic has encouraged a number of midstream and retail companies to invest in supply chain mapping and social auditing that would not have been undertaken on purely ethical grounds.

Blockchain-based traceability systems, piloted by companies including Everledger and by initiatives such as the Gemfields-supported Gemfair programme, offer the technical infrastructure to attach social provenance data to individual parcels of rough material. Whether these systems will reliably capture gender-disaggregated data — rather than simply recording physical chain-of-custody information — depends on the design choices made by programme operators and the standards bodies that govern them. Advocacy by organisations including the ICA and ARM has pushed for gender equity indicators to be included as standard fields in traceability frameworks, rather than optional additions.

Challenges and Honest Assessments

Progress in this area, while genuine, should not be overstated. The gem sector's supply chains remain among the least transparent in global commerce, and independent verification of social conditions at mine sites is difficult and expensive. Many empowerment programmes have been small in scale, short in duration, and dependent on donor funding that is inherently uncertain. The structural factors that disadvantage women in producing communities — including customary land tenure, limited access to formal financial services, and gender norms that restrict women's mobility and economic autonomy — are not amenable to resolution through industry programmes alone.

There is also a risk that the language of women's empowerment is adopted as marketing positioning without substantive change in supply chain practices. Responsible sourcing claims that are not independently audited and that do not include gender-disaggregated data should be treated with appropriate scepticism by buyers and consumers.

The most credible assessments of progress come from longitudinal studies that track income, asset ownership, and decision-making authority over multiple years, rather than from programme-cycle evaluations that measure outputs (number of women trained, number of cooperatives formed) rather than outcomes. Such studies, conducted by Pact, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and academic researchers affiliated with institutions including the University of Queensland's Sustainable Minerals Institute, provide a more nuanced picture: genuine gains in specific contexts, significant remaining gaps, and strong evidence that the design details of interventions — particularly around legal formalisation, access to finance, and sustained technical support — determine whether gains are durable.

Outlook

The convergence of responsible sourcing standards, consumer transparency demands, and development finance directed at ASM formalisation creates a more favourable environment for women's economic empowerment in the gem trade than has existed at any previous point. The ICA's ongoing engagement with producing-country communities, the RJC's audited standards, and the work of organisations such as Pact and ARM provide institutional infrastructure that can be built upon. The critical variables are whether industry actors are willing to invest in the sustained, multi-year interventions that produce durable change, and whether gender equity is treated as a core supply chain standard rather than a supplementary social programme. The evidence from the field is clear: when women in the gem trade have equitable access to licences, capital, training, and market information, the economic outcomes improve not only for those women but for their households and communities. That case, grounded in documented evidence rather than aspiration, is the strongest argument for continued and deepened commitment.