GGCA Gender and Climate Change Training Manual - Women's ...

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Climate change and
gender inequalities are inextricably
linked. By exacerbating
inequality overall, climate change
slows progress toward gender
equality and thus impedes efforts
to achieve wider goals like
poverty reduction and sustainable
development. Gender inequality
can worsen the impacts of climate
change (see Box 1); meanwhile,
taking steps to narrow the gender
gap and empower women can
help reduce these impacts.
Box 1 Gender inequality and
climate change
In some communities in Bangladesh,
women are deprived of the capacity to cope
with disasters by being kept in dependent
positions in terms of accessing information
from the world outside the bari, and by being
denied the right to take major decisions. In
this respect, purdah 2 as an institution which
prevents women from engaging in socioeconomic
roles outside the household
directly prescribes women’s vulnerability to
disaster.
Source: Ikeda, 1995.
3.1 Causes of vulnerability, or specific conditions that make
women, especially poor women, vulnerable to climate change
Vulnerability is a reflection of the state of the individual and collective
physical, social, economic and environmental conditions at hand. These
individual and collective conditions are shaped by many factors, among which
gender plays a key role. Gender-based vulnerability does not derive from a
single factor, but reflects historically and culturally specific patterns of relations in
social institutions, culture, and personal lives (Enarson, 1998). Gender relations will
shape the above-mentioned four conditions of vulnerability. The intersection of
these factors with caste, racial and other inequalities, creates hazardous social
conditions that place different groups of women at risk (Enarson, 1998).
However, there is a need to avoid being simplistic and just seeing
women (because of their sex) as victims. Women are not vulnerable because
they are “naturally weaker”: women and men face different vulnerabilities due
to their different social roles. For example, many women live in conditions of social
exclusion. This is expressed in facts as simple as differentials in the capacity to run
or swim, or constraints on their mobility, and behavioural restrictions, that hinder
their ability to re-locate without their husband’s, father’s or brother’s consent.
2
Purdah - a norm that prescribes spatial movement, behaviour and attitudes of women.