Ana Juarez, Founder &amp; Executive Director at Women in Mining Central America&nbsp;was NileFM's guest at the "CEO Women" Conference, and she shared her experience as a woman in the mining industry, and the challenges she faced to lead as a woman in a male-Dominated Industry.&nbsp;
Ana is an accomplished professional with a proven track record in the mining industry. She brings a unique blend of expertise and leadership with experience as a non-executive director and more than 15 years of experience in environmental consulting within the mining sector.
Ana's commitment to advancing gender equality and educational initiatives in the mining sector has earned her recognition as one of the 100 global inspirational women in mining in 2002, the most inspiring woman in mining in 2003, and the Rising Star Award. She is also one of the first Central American women to join the board of directors of a publicly listed mining company. she also wrote a bestselling book titled "Ana&rsquo;s Adventure At The Mine" which was translated into eight languages.
What does empowering women mean to you?&nbsp;
I think the word that comes to mind immediately is uplifting&mdash;how we uplift each other. We cannot uplift ourselves; it has to come from someone else. You need people to support you in whatever you're doing. You cannot be a leader if you don't have followers. You cannot achieve great things by yourself either. I think it has to be part of a group of people supporting you to get there.
When we think about women empowerment, we think about who you're supporting, of course, but who is supporting you to be in that position as well?
How have you broken those barriers to reach all the success you've reached today in the field of mining?&nbsp;
Mining has such a long history in our world. I've been in Egypt right now for the last week, and we visited so many places. Everything I saw comes from mining. It's not something that's new; it has been part of our life and our society for so long. We just forget it. If you think about all the monuments that are here, everything comes from marble and limestone, and everything was mined. Mining has always been there, but women have not always been part of the industry.
If you think about what is happening now, we have around 8% to 17% of women representation in the mining workforce, so it's very low. If you consider that in other industries, you have around 35%, I think that's the percentage that's used worldwide. We're almost 20% down in the mining industry. If we think about women in leadership positions in the mining industry, that percentage gets even lower. Last time I heard, the co-positions were less than 3%, 4%, or 5%. There are very few women in mining who are working as CEOs. If you think about board positions, it gets even harder. Of course, nowadays, with so many quotas needed to fill, it has changed and evolved. We have more women representing, but where there are no quotas and they don't need to comply, the representation is still very low.
If I think about women like myself&mdash;Latinas who are also young and women of color&mdash;below 60, I must say, because all the men are mainly white and older, we are around 1%. There are just very, very few women managing to be in the mining industry. It's a bit hard; it hurts to say it, but it's a reality. We are not enough women. I was mentioning this in the panel before. One of the things is that it's a very technical industry. We don't want women just to be on the administrative side; there are not enough roles also in the administrative side. We also need women on the technical side, and I think that's where we're lacking.
There are not enough women in our countries. At least I think I heard right now on the panel that there are some differences in these countries, which I'm really happy to see. But in our countries, we see that there's not enough women studying STEM roles&mdash;science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That's what we do in mining engineering, so a lot of these roles cannot be filled by women because women don't study those careers. It's a hard process, and we see that there's still a lot of change that we need to do. But yes, it's a reality that we are facing.
when people hear about your career, when you walk into a room, do you feel like there's still something to be proven?
Yes, 100%. I don't know if sometimes it&rsquo;s us women feeling that we need to&mdash;last time I heard a statistic, it said that when a position is open, men with 50% of the qualifications apply for it. Women need to be overqualified; they need to feel that they comply with 100% and more to even be considered or to even think of applying.
Sometimes I feel that it comes from us that we need to be super sure that we're going to do the work well. I think sometimes it doesn't come from men; sometimes it comes from our backgrounds and the way we were brought up. when I was seeing the panels, there were a lot of women doctors&mdash;very well-prepared women who were very skilled&mdash;and then I saw the men, of course, who were skilled too, but they were not as qualified as the women. So I think we as women always try to overachieve because we feel that we need to prove that we are worthy of the seat.
It's not easy to write a book. What inspired you, with the career that you have, to put it into a book?
One of the gaps we saw as women in the industry was the STEM gap. We didn't see enough women studying STEM to be able to fulfill roles, and of course, we don't have enough women working in the mining industry. One of the things I did was to start a nonprofit called Women in Mining Central America. My real work is as an environmental consultant, which is funny, but I started this nonprofit, and the idea is that we started working with kids because we had plans for the short term, medium term, and long term.
Of course, working with kids is not going to bring immediate results, but I knew that it was important for accomplishing the long-term objective that we wanted. The first initiative we had was a kids&rsquo; mining club, so it's like Scouts, but it's like Scouts for learning about minerals and mining.
That's amazing! We started that initiative, and because we didn't have enough literature for kids, I wrote the book called "Ana's Adventures in the Mine." The idea of the book is that it&rsquo;s like a Harry Potter book&mdash;very adventurous&mdash;but at the same time, we wanted it to be educational, and we wanted to plant a seed. We wanted the kids to think, and because all the characters of the story are real women who work in the mining industry, we wanted them to see themselves reflected, thinking, "Okay, I can be part of the industry."
The interesting part is that all the women in the story have different backgrounds. One is a chemist, another is a lawyer, and so many others with different careers. I wanted them to see that you don't have to be a geologist to enter the industry; you can be many things and still be part of it. This is the little seed we wanted to plant to encourage our kids.
Of course, it grew much more than I would have ever thought. In six months, we had a spot on the Amazon bestseller list. The book has been translated and is coming out in other languages right now, almost counting eight languages. We have German and Chinese coming out soon as well. It has been distributed around the world, which was incredible too&mdash;to get pictures from kids in Greece, South Africa, Argentina, and really all parts of the world, seeing themselves as part of the industry.
That was an interesting process to undertake, and I hope that it supports the vision I have of having more women in the industry.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Ana Juarez, Founder & Executive Director At Women In Mining Central America On Navigating Challenges And Paving The Way For Women In The Mining Industry

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