My response to this question was to turn to the existing though limited literature on the subject of climate change and gender. Two themes recurred throughout – women as vulnerable or women as virtuous in relation to the environment. The literature makes two things seemingly obvious: women in the South will be affected much more adversely by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute much more than their female counterparts. Common to both places is that women are not part of the decision making bodies, as it is predominantly the men in their societies who affect policy making often to the detriment of women. In other words, women in the South are extremely vulnerable to climate change while women in the North are much more conscientious when it comes to dealing with climate change, possessing virtues of environmentalism which men with their propensity for long distance travel and meat eating do not have.
These assumptions can be found in policy statements and other government documents. Women as the particularly vulnerable subjects of climate change is the only reference made to gender in the Indian Government's National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008:14), "The impacts of climate change could prove particularly severe for women. With climate change there would be increasing scarcity of water, reductions in yields of forest biomass, and increased risks to human health with children, women and the elderly in a household becoming the most vulnerable. (...) Special attention should be paid to the aspects of gender." The Swedish Bill on climate and energy policy (Regeringens Proposition 2008:220) echoes some of these sentiments but with its own prejudices attached. "Many developing countries are especially vulnerable to climate effects because of poverty, conflicts, lack of gender and social equality, environmental degradation and lack of food" (my emphasis). The Bill regards gender equality and women's role in development as having an important bearing on work with climate change in the South and as being relevant in Sweden basically in the transport sector.
These ideas echo early debates on women and development when the different work and interests of women in relation to the environment began to be documented. The gender and climate change literature also reiterates ideas about women's poverty, vulnerability and virtuousness . Some of these arguments, although apparent in a commonsensical way, have not always proven to be empirically or statistically rigorous, leading instead to the discounting of the importance of gender and other crosscutting axes of power in environmental management and policy making. I found two arguments about women in relation to climate change. One is that women in the South are the poorest of the poor and hence more vulnerable to the vagaries of climate change. Second, women in the North are more environmentally conscious than men and tend to be more open to change. This led me to dig deeper into the research on which these statements are based.
It has been recognized that the effects of climate change will be harshest in tropical countries in the South and will affect the poor the most. According to Hemmati & Röhr, women represent a disproportionate share of the poor and are likely to be disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change (2007:7). Others note that 70% of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world living below the threshold of poverty are women (Denton 2002:10; Röhr 2006). Johnsson-Latham, points to a World Bank study that claims that gender differences are greatest among the poorest families. Women also eat last and least in poor families (2007:42). The Swedish Defence Agency's base data report professes to present the major gender issues in climate adaptation from a Swedish perspective, "Since climate adaptation has a high degree of international interdependence, if gender aggravates climate problems in other countries, this can have significant indirect effects in Sweden" (Hansson 2007:9). Similarly Oldrup & Breengaard (2009:47) write, "In developing countries, women's needs are often not taken into consideration, and their participation in the climate change processes and debates is not sufficient at the national level."
It is also believed that women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men during disasters (Brody et al. 2008:6).* Women's vulnerability is ascribed to cultural and gender mores in many texts. Taking the example of the Asian Tsunami where the largest numbers of fatalities were women and children under the age of 15, Brody et al. write that it has been documented that women in Bangladesh did not leave their houses during the floods due to cultural constraints on female mobility and those who did were in any case often unable to swim in the flood waters.
Women are also considered more sensitive to risk, more prepared for behavioural change and more likely to support drastic policies and measures on climate change (Brody et al 2009:15 drawing on Hemmati (2005). The willingness of women to embrace attitudinal change is a recurring theme in the literature on countries in the North. According to Johnsson-Latham from Sweden (whose report has been cited extensively by those working on climate change and gender), one must start by asking, who are the polluters? The unequivocal answer there, she believes, is 'men' who need to start paying for the pollution. In her view, gender specific patterns show in general that the polluter is a man, whether poor or rich (2007:34). She points out that instead, the focus of attention when it comes to dealing with climate change is on technology and technicians as a professional group – most of whom are men – and are portrayed as the solution to the problem (2007:26).
Based on research on transportation in Europe she highlights the fact that men own more cars and travel longer distances to work, thus emitting much more carbon into the atmosphere. Latham writes that women on the other hand, tend to travel shorter distances and most often by public transport, use cheaper alternatives like the bicycle or walk and tend to make socially rational choices. "Whereas women represent a more human perspective by showing more consideration for road safety etc., it is men who dominate decision-making" (2007:44-60). She concludes by saying that women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change. Other researchers have also pointed out that men's meat consumption surpasses that of women and since livestock rearing accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas consumption, they are thus more polluting (Fagt 2006 in Oldrup and Breengaard 2009:25). However, Latham mentions additionally that well educated and better paid women also travel further. So it would appear that it is in fact women, but mainly poor women, who are most virtuous and conscientious in relation to the environment.
Vulnerable or virtuous?
Chant writes that the assertion that women make up 70% of the poor, anecdotal rather than empirically or statistically rigorous, is usually coupled with the deeply problematic assertion about the feminisation of poverty. On the one hand while it has been useful in garnering resources for women, on the other, it simplifies the concepts of poverty and gender (Chant 2010:1). The unfortunate term "feminization of poverty", writes Jackson, has come to mean not (as gender analysis would suggest) that poverty is a gendered experience, but that the poor are mostly women leading to the fallacy that poverty alleviation would automatically lead to gender equality (1996:491).
Gender and poverty are two distinct forms of disadvantage (Jackson 1996:497). Jackson asks, "Are there no gender issues among those who are not the deserving poor?" In her article 'Gender and the Poverty Trap' she carefully shows the inconsistencies - in the assumption that all women headed households are poor, in the invalidity of the time-series (due to high intra-group variations) on which they base their assumptions (Ahmad and Chalk 1994) and in the arguments about food bias that are being seriously questioned (e.g. Lipton and Payne, etc). She shows further that the increases in mortality during famines affect men more than women, that women tend to have a greater life expectancy though they may not have better health, that violence has to do with other things than poverty and points to empirical evidence that shows that gender relations are in fact more equitable in many poor Indian households than in wealthier ones (Ibid).
The claim that more women die in natural calamities is true of several instances. However, research has shown that women do die more but where socio-economically disadvantaged – as soon as the socio-economic level rises, this difference tends to disappear (Neumayer and Plumper 2007). Gender is important but needs to be seen in its particular context. For example on the question of energy, Skutsch writes, "Basically it is very difficult to make a strong case for a real gender difference, not least because income factors may have a much more important and confounding influence on energy use than gender" (2002:33). Gender is thus so much more than poverty and women are not a homogenous category. Women can be rich or poor, urban or rural, from different ethnicities, nationalities, households and families all of which produce specific results. A poor man in India is unlikely to be as polluting as a woman in Sweden or for that matter as much of a polluter as a rich woman in India. By insisting merely on women's vulnerability or virtuousness (based sometimes on questionable statistics or beliefs) we neglect to see the important gendered aspects of climate change and how they may effectively be dealt with.
Gender is not considered as important in the North (or at least not as important in Sweden as it is supposed to be in the South), as is evident in the Bill as well as in the Defence Agency's report. The obvious answer to this is of course that in many countries in the South, such as in India, natural resources are a question of livelihoods in a more direct way. But the distance of the resource from a direct source of livelihood should not blind us to the fact that gender in environmental matters is as important in Sweden as it is in India (see Arora-Jonsson 2009). According to Jackson it was easier to make gender an issue of poverty than to view gender disadvantage as crossing boundaries of class and ethnicity, and directing attention to the gendered character of development agencies themselves.. (...).. the subordination of women is not caused by poverty. Women who are not poor...(...) experience subordination of different kinds (1996:501). The evidence for gender violence against women spreads across all regions, classes, cultures and age groups and there are no grounds for believing that it is alleviated with increasing prosperity (Richters 1994 in Jackson 1996:501).
Unequal gender relations do not cause climate change. But gender relations do determine how the environment is managed. Arguments about women's vulnerability in the South and their virtuousness in the North are an effort to keep women and gender on the climate change map from where their presence is all too easily erased. However, it is dangerous to attribute responsibility by gender (c.f. Skutsch 2002:34). It is easy to discredit such assumptions and more importantly we ignore the interrelated factors and axes of power that would help us understand how best to deal with the problems of climate change and its unequal effects.
By Seema Arora Jonsson, Assitant Professor
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* Brody et al cite an IUCN/WEDO (2004) report as do several others who make this statement, sometimes as a statement of fact. On being contacted IUCN further refers this citation to a report by another author. When we wrote to the author of the report, it appeared that the statement was made at a presentation at a natural hazards workshop between 1994-96, with the author subsequently including it in a report. This statement has since then been picked up and presented as a 'fact' in innumerable documents on natural disasters.