Gendering Climate Change: Myth vs Reality

By Emily Passmore

Although we are all affected by climate change, we are not all affected to the same degree. Those in poverty, who are most reliant on natural resources and least able to adapt and rebuild following natural disasters, are most severely impacted by the effects of climate change. As women make up 70% of those in poverty worldwide, they are more vulnerable to climate change than men. Tackling climate change fairly requires a sensitivity to this gender disparity, but we must guard against slips into gender essentialism in the climate movement.
 
Patriarchal structures and climate
Women’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change stems from oppressive social, economic and cultural institutions. Women are not only more likely than men to live in poverty, but patriarchal structures also often mean that women are more locked into poverty than men. For example, they are excluded from ownership of land and property, making up 50-80% of the world’s food production workforce yet owning only 10% of the land. They are therefore reliant on others for their livelihoods and homes, and are often unable to make proactive changes to adapt to climate change. Furthermore, motherhood often means women are less able to move around for work or in the aftermath of climate disasters.
 
Despite these challenges, women are often in the best position to design and implement ways to adapt to climate change. For example, women in Latin America have designed new, more sustainable ways to farm, such as patio gardens, applying their existing knowledge of how to source and provide food to a new problem. Policies designed solely by men are likely to miss out on these insights, thereby creating less effective solutions, or perhaps ignoring certain climate issues altogether as they have simply never had to think about issues specifically faced by women.
 
A just climate movement must platform women’s voices – however, it is important to remember that women’s experiences are incredibly diverse. A truly feminist climate movement cannot just include white 'Western' women and believe it can speak to the problems faced by all women. What we need is an intersectional approach to climate, acknowledging the ways in which both racial and gender hierarchies, along with countless other axes of oppression, combine to make different groups more or less vulnerable.
 
Constructed identities
It is clear that women are a key part of a just climate movement, and can provide key insights on how to move forward. However, some have taken this argument further, claiming that women are innately more suited to tackling the climate crisis—it is said they are inherently more altruistic and caring than men, and as givers of life, far more suited to protect the world. Nature is often characterised as feminine – think of Mother Earth. This perspective can sometimes tip into assigning responsibility for nature to women, seeing them as connected to the environment on some deeper level.
 
This gender essentialism, claiming that differences between men and women are at least in some way innate rather than socially constructed, cannot play a part in any truly just climate movement. Though claiming to empower women, it in fact reduces them to a caring role, embedding existing stereotypes and assigning women responsibility for a problem they are largely not responsible for, particularly in the case of women from the developing world, while absolving men of responsibility.
 
A feminist climate movement must therefore acknowledge the increased violence women suffer as a result of climate change, and tap into the insights women have on fighting climate change thanks to their roles in society, while at the same time guarding against a regressive gender essentialism that threatens to segregate the fight for a sustainable future.
 
We are all part of the environment, and we all have a duty protect it; theories advocating this theoretical equality, whilst acknowledging the historical factors making some more susceptible to or responsible for climate change, are the most progressive way forward for the climate movement. Take hydrofeminism, which sees each of us as a watery body, taking things in and giving things out alongside every other body on Earth. We can and should acknowledge humanity’s connection with nature – however, unlike so many other aspects of the climate crisis, this connection is not gendered.

Im​age credit: Pascal Bernardon, Unsplash