Gender equality saves lives, improves resilience

IPS: When ministers and government officials meet at the end of this year for a critical U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, they should bear in mind that the mortality rate for women during climate-related natural disasters is an average of 14 times higher than for men. "Existing inequalities determine who is dying," Rebecca Pearl, the coordinator of the Global Gender & Climate Alliance, told IPS.

After the 2004 Asian tsunami, the level of women’s mortality was in the range of 55 to 80 percent, with Indonesia the hardest-hit. Meanwhile, recovery grants often went only to male heads of households, since most women didn't own any land.

In 1998, when severe flash floods hit Bangladesh, women's mortality reached 90 percent. "The reasons behind this are that women were not taught how to swim and they were not allowed to leave their households. So when the flood happened and their men weren’t there, they didn’t want to leave their children behind or their culture didn’t permit them to leave their households without their husbands," Pearl told IPS.

By contrast, when Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras that very same year, only the small community of La Masica reported no deaths. The reason was that women had participated in an early warning systems training six months earlier, and as a result evacuations were organised in time, making it the only community that had a 100-percent survival rate.

A 2006 study by the London School of Economics analysing disasters in 141 countries found that gender differences in deaths from natural disasters are directly linked to women’s economic and social rights. When women’s rights are not protected, more women than men will die from natural disasters, while when women’s rights are protected, the same number of women and men die from natural disasters.

…Helene Oldrup, a researcher on gender studies at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen, talked about how gender perspective can contribute to negotiation and practices: "In the developing world especially, more effective use of knowledge and resources can lead to better decision making."

Three women carrying goods on their heads walking home from a market in Kenya. Shot by Angela Sevin, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License