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The purpose of this study is to gain increased knowledge about gender diversity and innovation in mining by analyzing how women are discursively represented in relation to these two concepts, and in doing so establish how diversity management is received and communicated in the industry.

The study is based on analysis of texts including references to gender diversity and innovation in mining found on the web. The tool used to retrieve the data has been WebCorpLive, a tool designed for linguistic analysis of web material.

Although increased female representation is communicated as a key component in the diversity management discourse, based on the idea that diversity increases innovation and creativity, closer analysis of texts on diversity and innovation in mining shows that what women are expected to contribute with has little explicit connection with innovation.

The study contributes with increased knowledge about diversity management by providing an example of how it is received in a traditionally male-dominated industry.

The findings indicate that for diversity management to have a real effect in mining, it needs to be based on gender equality and social justice motives, rather than on a business case rationale – the principal motive today. To enable this change, stereotypical gender patterns, as shown in this study, need to be made visible and problematized among policy makers, practitioners and actors on all levels of the industry.

The study contributes with new knowledge about gender in the mining industry previously not attended to by using a method which so far has been sparsely used in discourse analysis, although pointed out as promising.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute with increased knowledge about gender in mining by exploring how women are discursively represented in texts produced by actors in the international mining arena.

The study combines corpus linguistic methods and discourse analysis. It implies a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, where the former is used as the point of departure for the latter, and where the material analysed is chosen on the basis of certain selected search phrases. The source for the study is the web, and the search engine used for the retrieval of data is WebCorp Live, a tool tailored for linguistic analysis of web material.

The analysis reveals that although the overarching theme in the women-in mining discourse is that women are needed in the industry, the underlying message is that women-in-mining are perceived as problematic.

The study shows that if mining is to change into a modern industry, the inherent hyper-masculine culture and its effects on the whole industry needs to be problematised and made evident. To increase the mere number of women, with women still heavily underrepresented, is not enough to break gender-biased discrimination.

The research contributes with new knowledge about gender in mining by using a method, which so far has had limited usage in (critical) discourse analysis.