Affirmative Action and Women's Agency in New Caledonia CANCELLED

This paper aims to analyze the effects of an affirmative action  : how and to what extent it allows kanak women’s agency. Since 2006, there is a rise of continuous vocational training targeting the « booming professions » (construction industry, metalworking industry, mining…) with an affirmative action and  communication campaigns to incitate women to choose these professions. This paper focuses on kanak women from 30 to 44 years old enrolled in training of mining vehicle driver. The data rely on biographical interviews of women associated to observations in training centers and boarding school. Those women raised in a mining background with a certain closeness to their father until puberty. This situation feeds their childhood imagination as if they transgress the sexual division of labour The process of subjectivation in adulthood relies on a double outside and inside movement, in which the historical context offers a material opportunity whose women seizes, or not, according to their relation to the profession ( role of imagination), their social rank and their marital status. Then the very activity of working, because it is socially valued, brings about changes in their relationship to themselves, to others and to gender and race domination.