Joane Nagel
University of KansasGenders, Disasters, and Climate Change“Say what?! Gender and climate change? Doesn’t climate change affect everyone? It’s a global issue, not a
gender issue.” These comments were made by a colleague a couple of years ago when I was beginning research
on global climate change. While recounting a paper by Terry Cannon about the impact of the 1991cyclone on
women in Bangladesh, I wondered aloud whether or not there were gendered dimensions to global climate
change. My colleague’s skepticism motivated this paper. Cannon (2002) noted that Bangladesh is one of the
few countries in the world where men live longer than women, and she argued that women’s poverty and
vulnerability to weather-related flooding are among the reasons why (see also Begum 1993). Natural scientists
have hypothesized increased intensity of hurricanes and rising sea levels with associated coastal flooding are
likely associated with global climate change (IPCC 2007; Knutson 2008; Santer et al. 2006; Li et al. 2009). This
prediction suggests that research like Cannon’s on gender and disasters might be relevant to understanding the
gendered aspects of vulnerabilities, impacts, and mitigation and adaptation strategies associated with climate
change. In this paper I explore some of the implications of gender for the study of global climate change.
What do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global
climate change?
Gender Matters: It should not be surprising that climate change might have a gendered face. Sociological
research has documented many ways that gender matters in societies: work and labor force participation, health
behavior and outcomes, family dynamics, civil and human rights, crime and delinquency, political attitudes
and participation, discrimination, violence, consumer decision-making, and risk behavior, to name a few.^46
Sociological analyses of gender matters in social life have implications for understanding the human dimensions
of global climate change. Women’s and men’s relative places in society and the moral economies that define
their worth position them differently in terms of their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, access to
resources associated with recovery from climate-related disasters, and participation in the political processes that
shape mitigation and adaptation policies.
Gender and Vulnerability: Researchers report that vulnerability to disasters—climate and otherwise—is highly
influenced by the demographic and social characteristics of victims including race, class, gender, and age.^47
“Vulnerability is a function of the exposure (who or what is at risk) and the sensitivity of the system (the degree
to which people and places can be harmed)” (Cutter et al. 2008:4). The International Federation of Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies estimated that of the approximately 140,000 killed in the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh,
90 percent were women and children (Schmuck 2002). What were the factors that made women and children in
Bangladesh so vulnerable to the storm, and are there gender lessons to be learned about the weather-related and
flooding disasters that could result from global climate change?
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
Gender and Material & Moral Economies: Women and men occupy different spaces in economies—whether
(^46) For overviews of gender matters in social science, see Anderson & Collins 2006; Marchbank & Letherby 2007.
(^47) Cutter et al. (2008:4) define vulnerability as “the pre-event, inherent characteristics or qualities of systems that create the potential for
harm or differential ability to recover following an event.”