The Quick Read
- Women remain restricted from underground mine work in several countries, including China, where labour law prohibits female workers from working down mine pits.
- Mining researcher Linqi Huang, who says Central South University appointed her as its first female professor in mining engineering in 2026, has described travelling to mines for research only to be denied underground access.
- The restriction has deep historical roots. ILO Convention No. 45, adopted in 1935, prohibited women from underground mine work and accumulated 98 ratifications before being abrogated by the International Labour Conference in 2024.
- Underground mining carries serious risks, and recent South African research shows women can face specific ergonomic, equipment and sanitation problems. The policy challenge is therefore not to pretend the risks do not exist, but to regulate them more precisely.
- Huang proposes distinguishing between long-duration production work, short supervised research or educational visits, and surface-based technical roles rather than treating every activity associated with an underground mine as equivalent.
The professor who could study the mine but not always enter it
There is something awkward about being qualified to make an underground mine safer and still being told you cannot go down to see it.
Linqi Huang knows that contradiction first-hand.
A mining engineering researcher at Central South University in Changsha, China, Huang works on microseismic monitoring and mine safety warning systems. Her university profile lists mining industrial engineering and safety science among her disciplines.
Yet Huang writes in Nature that during research visits in China and abroad, she has repeatedly arrived at mines only to discover that she could not enter underground because she is a woman. In some cases, the fieldwork had already been planned before the restriction became apparent.
The irony is difficult to miss.
A researcher can help design the system that detects danger below ground. She may still be unable to inspect the environment in which the system is supposed to work.
For women in underground mining, this is where an old safety philosophy begins colliding with a much newer industry.
The ban came from a very different mining world
The history matters.
In 1935, the International Labour Organisation adopted the Underground Work (Women) Convention, commonly known as Convention No. 45.
Its central provision was remarkably broad: No female, whatever her age, should be employed on underground work in any mine.
The rule reflected the labour thinking of its period.
Mining was extraordinarily dangerous. Workplace protections were weaker. Occupational health science was less developed. Equipment was overwhelmingly designed around male workers. Women were frequently treated in labour law as a group requiring special protection.
The convention spread widely. It ultimately received 98 ratifications. But labour policy moved on.
The ILO increasingly favoured modern mine-safety standards that regulate hazards rather than categorically excluding women, including the Safety and Health in Mines Convention of 1995. Its own standards-review work encouraged countries bound by Convention No. 45 to consider moving towards the newer safety framework.
In 2024, Convention No. 45 was formally abrogated.
The international standard disappeared. Some national restrictions did not.
China still prohibits women from underground mine work
China provides the clearest contemporary example because it is where Huang works. Article 59 of China’s Labour Law prohibits employers from assigning women to work “down the pit of mines”.
The country’s mine-safety legislation similarly states that mining enterprises may not assign women to underground work. Huang notes that dozens of countries continue to maintain comparable restrictions or their legacies.
Some are direct statutory bans. Others arise through older labour rules, occupational restrictions or regulatory systems that make underground access difficult for women. And that distinction is important.
It is not simply a story about whether women should be employed as full-time underground miners.
Modern mining contains far more kinds of work than the law’s original categories imagined.
A mine is no longer only people digging underground
Consider what mining researchers and engineers now do.
- They install sensors.
- Calibrate monitoring systems.
- Analyse seismic signals.
- Model ventilation.
- Study ground movement.
- Inspect geological cores.
- Work with autonomous machinery.
- Test communications systems.
- Plan rehabilitation.
- Monitor environmental effects.
- Operate equipment remotely.
Much of that work can be performed above ground. Some of it cannot.
- A researcher may need 2 supervised hours underground to understand where a sensor should be placed.
- An engineer may need to inspect a fault in equipment.
- A student may need field exposure.
- A safety specialist may need to understand how workers actually move through the mine.
That is very different from spending years working full production shifts underground. Yet a blanket prohibition can treat the two as the same activity.
That is the problem Huang wants regulators to reconsider.
Mining really is dangerous
We cannot edit this part out simply because equality is the objective.
Underground mines can involve unstable rock, heat, dust, water ingress, machinery, restricted escape routes and other potentially fatal hazards. And women may encounter additional problems because mining workplaces were historically built almost entirely around male bodies.
A 2026 South African study involving women working in three underground coal mines found ergonomic and workplace problems, including equipment that did not adequately accommodate female workers, sanitation difficulties, and wider gaps in occupational health provision.
Another study examining underground female coal mineworkers found shortcomings in equipment design, task allocation and the physical work environment.
That evidence does not support the claim that women and men always experience identical risks. It supports doing the harder work of identifying the actual risk and fixing it.
Poorly fitted PPE is not an argument for excluding women. It is an argument for better PPE.
Unsafe sanitation does not establish that women do not belong underground. It establishes that the mine was not designed for its workforce.
Those are very different policy conclusions.
Women in underground mining: Protection can become occupational sorting
Blanket safety rules also have consequences far beyond the prohibited task.
Imagine 2 mining-engineering graduates. Both are equally qualified. One can participate in underground inspections when required. The other cannot legally enter.
An employer choosing a research assistant, site engineer or academic collaborator may prefer the candidate who can perform every part of the job. The woman may therefore lose an opportunity without ever having applied for an underground production role.
The restriction migrates. From access:
- To hiring.
- To research experience.
- To publications.
- To promotion.
- To academic leadership.
That progression helps explain why Huang’s other observation is so important.
When she began her research career about a decade ago, she says there were no female academics in the mining-engineering department at Central South University.
Only in 2026 was she appointed its first female professor.
That is not evidence that one law caused the absence. Mining’s gender imbalance has many causes. But it shows that the professional imagination around women in the discipline has recently begun to change.
You cannot easily build female professors of mining engineering while denying women access to some of the environments mining engineers are expected to understand.
The policy question should move from “woman or man?” to “what work?”
Huang proposes a much more precise system.
The first category would cover long-duration, high-exposure production work.
These jobs should carry the strongest statutory protections. Inclusion should never become an excuse to relax safety standards or pressure workers into dangerous conditions.
The second category would cover limited research and educational access.
A researcher who needs a short underground visit could be permitted entry subject to:
- site-specific risk assessment;
- mandatory safety training;
- properly fitted protective equipment;
- supervision;
- strict time limits;
- real-time location tracking;
- an emergency plan;
- and voluntary participation.
Where the risks cannot be controlled, access would still be denied. But the denial would follow assessment of the work, not the sex of the worker.
The third category concerns surface-based roles.
Candidates for jobs that do not actually require underground exposure should not be disqualified because another category of mining work carries restrictions.
That framework has an attractive policy quality. It distinguishes. Good regulation usually does.
We have seen this argument before
The mining debate belongs to a larger history of protective labour law.
Women were once restricted from working certain shifts because night travel was considered unsafe.
The safety concern was real. The regulatory response was to remove women from the shift.
As governments began replacing blanket restrictions with employer obligations around transport, consent and security, women gained access to jobs that had previously been harder to enter.
Change in Content recently examined precisely this question in our analysis of the impact of night-shift laws on women workers. Research on state-level reforms in India found that removing such restrictions could increase women’s employment, formal work and wages.
Mining presents a related problem.
The principle is worth remembering: A safety hazard does not automatically justify an identity-based prohibition.
Sometimes it justifies better safety regulation.
India offers an interesting counterpoint
India itself has travelled some distance on women and mining.
For decades, women faced significant restrictions around underground and night mining work. More recent regulatory changes have created routes for women to enter roles that were historically closed to them, subject to safety requirements.
Employers have begun testing what that looks like operationally.
At Tata Steel, women have been deployed across mining and core industrial roles, including all-women mining shifts. (Change in Content)
Hindustan Zinc has also expanded women’s participation around underground mining operations, including night-shift deployment and women-led mine-rescue capabilities. (Change in Content)
And Larsen & Toubro’s mining-equipment operation has trained and deployed an all-women team in field roles. (Change in Content)
None of these examples proves that every underground task is safe for every worker. They demonstrate something more useful.
The boundary between “women cannot do this” and “this work requires specific safeguards” is not fixed. Policy can move it.
Technology makes blanket categories even harder to defend
Mining itself is changing rapidly.
- Automation reduces some forms of direct exposure.
- Remote systems allow equipment to be monitored and controlled from the surface.
- Sensors create better information about heat, gases, seismic activity and worker location.
- Robotics can take over some of the most dangerous tasks.
- Digital twins and modelling allow engineers to understand mine conditions before entering.
That does not eliminate physical hazards. But it makes a law written around a single idea of “underground mining” increasingly crude.
Two jobs performed 500 metres below ground may have completely different exposure profiles. Similarly, 2 visits may differ dramatically in duration. And 2 mines may have very different infrastructure.
One worker may spend an eight-hour production shift near heavy machinery. Another may spend forty supervised minutes inspecting a sensor.
Calling both simply “underground work” and ending the assessment there wastes information that modern occupational safety systems are perfectly capable of using.
There is also a research-quality problem
Science suffers when researchers cannot observe the environment they study.
Mining is an applied discipline.
- Models have to encounter reality.
- Sensors need testing.
- Safety systems need validation.
- Engineering assumptions need inspection.
A researcher excluded from field access may have to rely on male colleagues for observations she would otherwise make herself. That can affect training and independence. It can also influence who becomes recognised as a field expert.
Academic careers are built from opportunities.
- Fieldwork produces experience.
- Experience produces publications.
- Publications help produce promotion.
- Promotion eventually produces professors.
Restrictions near the beginning of that chain can echo much further along it. Huang becoming the first woman professor in her department in 2026 is therefore worth celebrating. It should also make the timeline uncomfortable.
And safety rules themselves improve when women can participate
There is another reason to bring women closer to underground research. They may identify risks that male-dominated research teams overlook.
The South African studies on female mineworkers make that point inadvertently.
- Poorly designed equipment.
- Sanitation.
- PPE fit.
- Ergonomic load.
- Menstrual-health realities underground.
These problems become more visible when researchers study women’s actual experiences.
If women are kept out of the research environment, the industry risks reproducing a familiar loop: Few women work underground. So underground systems are designed mainly around men.
Those systems work poorly for women. Their poor fit is then used as evidence that women face greater underground risks. And the original exclusion becomes easier to defend.
Breaking that cycle requires women to participate in both the work and the science around it.
The answer is not “send everyone underground”
Policy reform can become careless when equality arguments are oversimplified. Nobody has a right to enter an unsafe mine simply to prove a point.
A regulator should still say no when rock conditions are unstable.
- When emergency evacuation is inadequate.
- When appropriate PPE cannot be provided.
- When exposure is unnecessary.
- When the worker lacks required training.
- When supervision cannot be guaranteed.
- When an equivalent research objective can safely be achieved without entry.
The distinction is that these reasons apply to risk. Not merely gender.
That produces a stronger safety regime because regulators have to explain exactly what is unsafe.
The Change: Replace the ban with the assessment
Old labour protections often began from a world with fewer technological safeguards, weaker employer obligations and a much narrower idea of women’s working lives.
Some did valuable work. Some survived long after the conditions around them had changed.
Mining now has the tools to make more precise decisions.
- Assess the task.
- Assess the mine.
- Assess duration.
- Assess exposure.
- Fit the equipment.
- Train the worker.
- Create an emergency plan.
- Require genuine consent.
- And refuse entry when those conditions cannot be met.
That may sound less decisive than a simple prohibition.
Good policy is often less simple. It asks more questions because the world contains more than one kind of risk.
Women in mining do not need safety standards lowered. They need safety standards sophisticated enough to recognise them as engineers, researchers and workers rather than as one permanent risk category.
Nearly a century after international labour law declared that no woman should work underground, the ILO has retired that convention.
National policy now has a harder job. Protect people from dangerous work without protecting women out of a profession.
Editorial Note
This Policy Pulse article is based principally on mining-engineering professor Linqi Huang’s August 2026 Nature commentary, supplemented by official ILO records, Chinese labour and mine-safety law, and recent peer-reviewed research on occupational risks for women working underground. Huang’s account that she became the first female professor in her mining-engineering department in 2026 is presented as reported by her in Nature. Her Central South University faculty page currently lists her as Professor. However, an older sentence in the profile body still describes her as Associate Professor, suggesting the page has not been fully updated.
The article does not argue that underground mine work is risk-free or that all existing restrictions should simply be removed. It argues for task- and exposure-based regulation to maintain occupational safety.
Sources
International Labour Organisation — Underground Work (Women) Convention, 1935 (No. 45): The convention prohibited women from underground work in mines and was eventually abrogated in 2024.
ILO NORMLEX — Ratifications of Convention No. 45: Records 98 historical ratifications of the convention.
People’s Republic of China — Labour Law: Article 59 prohibits assigning female workers to underground mine work.
People’s Republic of China — Law on Safety in Mines: The official law contains a corresponding restriction on assigning women to underground work.
Mokwena, Morodi & Shirinde — Uncovering the Ergonomic Risks Threatening the Health of Underground Female Coal Mineworkers: 2026 peer-reviewed research into women’s occupational and ergonomic experiences in South African underground coal mines.
Linqi Huang — Women face bans on research underground — here’s how to modernise the system: Nature, 27 August 2026. Huang sets out the case for risk-differentiated underground access.
