Johannesburg - Smangele Mngo-mezulu worked for 15 years at mining giant Anglo American, but apartheid-era laws banned her from donning a hard hat and shovelling ore.
Now, more than a decade after the collapse of race laws, she heads down into sweltering underground mines as the owner of her own company, with Anglo as one of her customers.
Women like Mngomezulu are still rare, despite the scrapping of laws prohibiting women from working in mines and demands by the government that firms change.
Women still make up only a fraction of the mining workforce, and only a handful have made it into top positions in South Africa, the world's biggest producer of gold and platinum.
"For heaven's sake, this is totally unacceptable," said Bridgette Radebe, who heads both her own junior mining firm and an organisation representing small mining companies.
"The opportunities are there, but women are not given the because there's a lot of resistance."
The constitution enshrines the doctrine of equality of the sexes and President Thabo Mbeki pays more than lip service to this - his cabinet of 30 includes 12 women.
But some attitudes still linger from the apartheid era, when black women suffered a double handicap, restricted by their gender and their race.
Women face a multitude of obstacles in the mining sector, ranging from resistance from male workers to their own perceptions about mining.
But they could benefit from the country's mining charter, which seeks to give more ownership to the black majority under the black economic empowerment plan.
The employment of women has crept higher as mining companies scramble to meet the government's requirement to have 10 percent of jobs filled by women by 2009.
Under the charter, firms run the risk of losing their licences if they fail to comply with a set of targets, which include boosting ownership by black people.
The early mining industry was built on back-breaking labour by poorly paid black men, who were prohibited from rising to skilled and professional posts.
A smattering of women were relegated to low-level posts such as clerks.
When Mngomezulu, now general secretary of the SA Women in Mining Association, worked in the library of Anglo American during the apartheid era, she never thought of heading into the mines.
"At the time, I never dreamed it would ever happen - that black people would actually have businesses at the mine," she said.
"As a woman in those days, I could never, ever think of being involved in mining."
Now, she sometimes struggles to convince women that the mining sector, one of the nation's biggest employers, offers opportunities for them.
"In our culture, a person who was working at the mines was a person who was not educated.
"Our mothers warned us that if we did not want to go to school, we would end up in the mines."
Mngomezulu's small business - Nesa Mining - employs 10 women, who use vacuum-type machines to sweep up metal-bearing material left behind in old mining areas.
Women mineworkers sometimes face a less-than-welcoming reception from men.
"Some of the guys really weren't too happy about it," Harmony Gold official Philip Kotze said during a mine visit last year.
"But I think the women are great; they're more organised than us and more disciplined. They don't go out drinking on a Friday."
Government statistics showed that women made up 3.5 percent of a total mining workforce of 443 300 last year, compared with 2.1 percent in 1994.
Some companies are moving faster than others. Harmony chief executive Bernard Swanepoel said recently that his company, the world's fifth-biggest gold producer, had boosted the numbers of women to about 8 percent of the workforce.
About 35 percent of Harmony's senior management are black people, women or others oppressed under apartheid, and its financial director is a black woman, Nomfundo Qangule.
Radebe, who heads coal and platinum firm Mmakau Mining, says women should agitate to move into mining companies' boardrooms or start their own firms.
At a recent conference, she cited a 2004 survey that showed four black women were non-executive board members of mining firms, while about a third of women in the sector worked as clerks.
"If you look at the cabinet, how many women are in cabinet, and you look at our boards, and it's nil. There is not a single woman who is an executive director and that has to stop," she said.
"The men are the ones who are running these boards, the men are the ones who own these companies. Maybe if we start owning them, things would start to change," Radebe said. - Reuters