Disasters are a frequent phenomenon in Bangladesh and have increased in frequency and severity since the late eighties. The consecutive devastating floods of 1987 and 1988 and the cyclone of 1991 attracted international attention. Due to geographical settings and anthropogenic causes, the country is exposed to disasters that include devastating floods, cyclones, tornadoes, tidal surges, riverbank erosion, drought, and salinity intrusion; and climate change is intensifying these events. Challenges of hazards and disasters affect all segments of the population, however, there is a gender dimension that shows the way women and men respond and adapt to these disasters. Both women and men are unable to utilize their time in productive activities due to the absence of employment opportunities. Women and girls have a wider range of responsibilities in their households due to their socially defined gender identity. During a disaster the affected households are often forced to move to shelters or refuges, where women have to perform their gender-assigned domestic responsibilities in difficult circumstances. When men move elsewhere in search of work, women have to shoulder both women’s and men’s tasks to maintain family sustenance with available resources. Women and girls suffer more than men from poverty, hunger, malnutrition, economic crises, environmental degradation, insecurity, and health-related problems, including those related to reproductive health and adolescence. Women and girls are also frequent victims of violence. However, despite challenges, women’s strategies are vital to rural populations’ ability to cope with and adapt to different phases of disasters. Gender and disaster discourse seeks explanations of the principal factors structuring the responses of women and girls during crises and in postdisaster situations. Issues related to women’s gender-specific disaster vulnerabilities and resilience mechanisms, and how they are affected by climate change and pandemic, require continuous research, and legal and regulatory frameworks must mainstream gender and disaster with inclusive interventions.
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Gender and Disaster in Bangladesh
Mahbuba Nasreen
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Gender, International Law, and Disasters
Marie Aronsson-Storrier
Charting gender within international law on disasters is a twofold exercise: The first, more limited, inquiry concerns the development of regulations on disasters and disaster risk and the position of gender within these instruments. The second, more foundational, question is that of the position of gender and the space allowed for feminist and queer perspectives within international law itself, which, in turn, relates strongly to the root causes of disasters and the creation of disaster risk.
References to a “gender-based” approach to disaster risk management are abundant in international law and policy instruments and can be seen in, for example, both the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (Sendai Framework) and the International Law Commission’s (ILC) 2016 Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters (ILC Draft Articles)—two leading international law and policy instruments on disasters. However, neither of these instruments accounts for a particularly inclusive view of gender, nor do they engage with the underlying reasons for gender inequality. This is illustrative of broader issues concerning gender in international law and policy, and many of the challenges and shortcomings of international law and policy on disasters are inherent and (re)produced in the very fabric of the international legal system. Therefore, in addition to exploring the extent to which gender has been incorporated into the legal frameworks on disasters to date, it is essential to also critically explore core structures and practices of international law.
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Disaster Through a Feminist Lens: Epistemology, Methodology, and Methods
Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete
The foregrounding of gender and, more importantly, the ways in which power produces structures of inequality that shape gendered disaster vulnerabilities have given way to feminist theorizing on disasters. Since the 1990s, feminist works have raised critical questions regarding how conceptualizations of disasters, and the methodologies through which these are studied, have historically privileged androcentric perspectives. Viewing disaster through a feminist lens brings to light other dimensions of living with and responding to risk and disaster that are often elided in gender-blind approaches.
For feminist research, theory and practice are not disconnected. Feminist research is explanatory as well as prescriptive, putting emphasis on the need for transformative change especially in unequal gender relations. This perspective is solidified in the ways that feminist approaches foreground the close connections between epistemology, methodology, and methods and the political/ethical orientations they embody. Applied to disaster studies, feminist research highlights the importance of: (a) placing gender and lived experiences at the center of analysis; (b) recognizing how power operates in these contexts; (c) exploring alternative means to represent lived realities through different methods; (d) embodying reflexivity in the research process; and (e) pursuing social, political, and institutional change.
Applications of feminist methodologies in disaster studies have led to the development of innovative techniques in constructing alternative accounts of disaster experiences. These include but are not limited to feminist participatory action research, photo-based methods, and alternative mapping techniques. These applications have helped reveal often neglected issues such as gendered violence, women’s lack of representation in decision-making, family dynamics affecting access and control, gendering of state and institutional processes, to name a few, in varying contexts of disaster.
In sum, applying a feminist lens offers alternative perspectives on how disasters affect women and other social groups, emphasizing the importance of equitable, inclusive, and ethical research practices. By challenging existing knowledge frameworks and highlighting the relational and intersectional dimensions of disaster experiences, feminist methodologies contribute to a deeper understanding of lived experiences of disasters and the ways in which these are gendered while communicating perspectives of change.
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Gender Differences in Risk Perception: A Review
Misse Wester, Evelyn Salas Alfaro, and Phu Doma Lama
Men and women perceive risks differently. This difference is systematic and shows that women have a higher risk perception for most risks compared to men. In particular, women are more concerned with environmental and climate related risks than men. One explanation put forth to account for these differences is that women by nature of their sex or gendered role are more oriented toward nurturing and caring, making them more in tune with nature. Possible explanations for why men have a significantly lower perception of risk have not received equal attention. There has also been an assumption that risk perception will influence preparedness, thus a high-risk perception should lead to a better preparedness. However, the relationship between perception and preparedness is not linear. Women’s higher risk perception does not lead to them being better prepared since women lack decision-making power or access to resources in many contexts. While it is important to include women in all stages of risk management, it is important to remember that not all women are the same, nor can women alone change the risk landscape. Instead, more attention needs to be devoted to the role of men and masculinities in order to better understand and address differences in risk perceptions and risk management strategies.
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Gender Mainstreaming and Climate Change
Margaret Alston
Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change, not because of innate characteristics but as a result of the social structures and cultural norms that shape gender inequalities. Feminist activists and transnational organizations continue to voice their concerns regarding the need for greater attention to gender inequalities in the context of climate change. Gender mainstreaming is a policy process designed to address the gendered consequences of any planned actions—the ultimate aim being to achieve gender equality. Gender mainstreaming emerged in the late 1990s at the Beijing Women’s Conference as a result of the frustrations of feminist activists and international nongovernmental organizations about the lack of attention to gender equality. Yet its implementation has been hampered both by a lack of vision as to its purpose and by ongoing tensions, particularly between those who espouse equality and those who support the mainstream. This has led to resistance to gender mainstreaming within departments and units that are charged with its implementation, and indeed a reluctance of key players to commit to gender equality. Yet there is still strong support for the original feminist intent from activists and researchers addressing the impacts of climate change. The transformational potential of gender mainstreaming is still viewed as a process that could address and challenge gender inequalities in the context of increasing climate challenges. However, there are barriers that must be overcome for the transformational potential of gender mainstreaming to be realized. These include equating climate justice with gender justice, ensuring that the radical feminist intent of gender mainstreaming is not co-opted by the neoliberal agenda of maximizing economic development over gender equality and women’s empowerment, and ensuring that organizations tasked with facilitating gender mainstreaming not only understand its intent but also address gender inequalities within their own organizational structures and practices.
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Researching Gender in Disasters
Chaya Ocampo Go
Natural hazards such as floods, droughts, and earthquakes do not discriminate, but individuals of varying gender identities are impacted by, experience, understand, and respond differently to disasters. Research on gender in disaster contexts first began in the 1990s and grew to examine topics including gendered vulnerabilities, capacities, women’s rights, and representation. This was bolstered by the rise of global women’s movements and the institutional recognition by international relief agencies and the United Nations of women’s needs and participation in disasters. In addition to the growth of various feminist movements, feminist scholarship in academia challenged the predominance of positivist epistemologies, quantitative methodologies, and male bias in the gathering, analysis, and presentation of data in disaster research. Feminist scholarship aided in the shift in disaster studies from a hazards paradigm to a vulnerability paradigm wherein the study of disasters is no longer confined to the measurement and management of physical forces but also includes the uncovering of the political processes that produce disasters. Feminist scholars began to promote the critical use of self-reflexive, in-depth qualitative methodologies such as ethnography, participatory action research, and activist collaborations with grassroots civic organizations. Such research studies examine power relations and inequalities, and they strive toward realizing emancipatory goals for social justice in the fields of disaster research and practice.
Critical disaster research continues to advance in the early 21st century through the persistent questioning of the “natural”-ness of disasters. Despite the great strides in gender studies in disasters, the word “gender” remains predominantly equated with the category of heterosexual women and therefore perpetuates the male–female and nature–culture divides inherent in the Western epistemologies that underlie disaster research. Therefore, scholars who employ postcolonial, antiracist, and decolonial feminist frameworks trouble the coloniality of disasters, theorize, and study the violence of the colonial present on gendered and racialized spaces and bodies. Creative arts-based and participatory methods, including oral histories, photovoice, interviews, theater, body mapping, among others, are used to make visible those who are misrepresented and absent in disaster discourse. Gender and sexual minorities have also been historically neglected in disaster research, and the advancement of queer scholarship has begun to make more visible the lives of non-heterosexual identities in disasters. The conduct of fieldwork, interviews, ethnography, autoethnography, and collaborative and even quantitative methods can be queered or made non-normative through the examination of intimacies, subjectivities, emotions, performativity, relationships, and ethics in gender research. Last, the rise of climate change adaptation studies, policies, and practices also presents similar gaps in gender research. Feminist research methods such as the use of participatory geographic information system mapping challenge technological assessments of climate change adaptation interventions. They aid instead in sustaining a political analysis of power, examining people’s susceptibility to harm, together with processes that maintain this exposure to danger for bodies of different gender identities.
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Masculinities and Disaster
Scott McKinnon
Gender plays a role in all phases of the disaster cycle, from the lived experience of disaster survivors to the development of disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy and practice. Early research into the entanglement of gender and disaster revealed how women are made more vulnerable to disaster impacts by sexist and misogynist social structures. Researchers have since identified women’s central roles in building disaster resilience and aiding community recovery. Feminist scholarship has been highly influential in disasters research, prompting consideration of how intersecting social characteristics, including gender, sexuality, race, class, and bodily ability each contributes to the social construction of disaster.
Drawing on work in the field of critical men’s studies, a small but growing body of research has engaged with the role of gender in men’s disaster experiences, as well as how hegemonic masculinity shapes emergency management practice, constructs widely understood disaster narratives, and influences the development of DRR policy, including policies related to the crisis of climate change. Rather than a fixed identity, hegemonic masculinity operates as a culturally dominant ideal to which men and boys are expected to strive. It is spatially constituted and relational, often defined by attributes including physical strength, bravery, and confidence.
To date, the most substantial focus of research into masculinity and disasters relates to the lived and bodily experience of men impacted by wildfire. Australian researchers in particular have identified ways in which hegemonic ideals increase the disaster vulnerability of men, who feel pressure to act with bravery and to exhibit emotional and physical strength in conditions of extreme danger. Expectations of stoicism and courage equally impact men’s recovery from disaster, potentially limiting opportunities to access necessary support systems, particularly in relation to mental health and emotional well-being.
Hegemonic masculine ideals similarly impact the experiences of frontline emergency workers. Emergency management workplaces are often constructed as masculine spaces, encouraging high-risk behaviors by male workers, and limiting opportunities for participation by people of other genders. Male dominance in the leadership of emergency management organizations also impacts policy and practice, including in the distribution of resources and in attentiveness to the role of gender in the disaster experiences of many survivors.
Dominant disaster narratives, as seen in movies and the news media, contribute to the idea that disaster landscapes are ideal places for the performance of hegemonic masculine identities. Male voices dominate in media reporting of disasters, often leaving invisible the experiences of other people, with consequences for how disasters are understood by the wider public. Common tropes in Hollywood cinema similarly depict disasters as masculine events, in which brave cisgender men protect vulnerable cisgender women, with people of other genders entirely invisible.
Identifying and addressing the role of masculinities in disaster is increasingly important within the crisis of global heating. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of disasters, new ways of engaging with the environment and constructing DRR policy has become more urgent. Research in this field offers a critical baseline by which to move beyond binary gender definitions and to address damaging masculine ideals that ultimately harm the environment and people of all genders.
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A Review of Gender and Refugee Studies in Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkiye
Irene Tuzi and Estella Carpi
Drawing upon academic sources and policy reports of nongovernmental organizations, the UN, and other bodies, it can be shown how most of these studies have often adopted a gender-binary approach, contributing to an over-focus on and to the stigmatization of “refugee women” as a self-standing category of analysis and a homogeneous social group, while differently gendered bodies on the move have been under-investigated. Although fluid understandings of gender have long since informed gender and sexuality theories, the binary approach, when coming to the field of forced migration, remained the most common way of framing displaced gendered bodies.
In this framework, the leading discussion revolves around how the women-focused literature in the Middle Eastern context has scarcely intertwined with the LGBTQ+ literature. The regional-based critical review, while noticing a refugee masculinity-focused literature on the rise, evidences an anachronistic compartmentalization between women-focused and LGBTQ+-focused research, which contradicts the performative interpretations of gender debated since the early 1990s while reinforcing a monolithic understanding of gendered experiences of displacement. As a result, to some extent, it can be argued that humanitarian and migration practices and policies tend to reflect the gender binarism underlying the related academic research.
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The Human Ecology of Disaster Risk in Cold Mountainous Regions
Kenneth Hewitt
A range of environmental and social dimensions of disasters occur in or are affected by the mountain cryosphere (MC). Core areas have glaciers and permafrost, intensive freeze-thaw, and seasonally abundant melt waters. A variety of cryospheric hazards is involved, their dangers magnified by steep, high, and rugged terrain. Some unique threats are snow or ice avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods. These highlight the classic alpine zones, but cryospheric hazards occur in more extensive parts of mountain ecosystems, affecting greater populations and more varied settings. Recently, habitat threats have become identified with global climate warming: receding glaciers, declining snowfall, and degrading permafrost. Particularly dangerous prospects arise with changing hazards in the populous mid-latitude and tropical high mountains. Six modern calamities briefly introduce the kinds of dangers and human contexts engaged. Disaster style and scope differs between events confined to the MC, others in which it is only a part or is a source of dangerous processes that descend into surrounding lowlands. The MC is also affected by non-cryospheric hazards, notably earthquake and volcanism. In human terms, the MC shares many disaster risk issues with other regions. Economy and land use, poverty or gender, for instance, are critical aspects of exposure and protections, or lack of them. This situates disaster risk within human ecological and adaptive relations to the predicaments of cold and steepland terrain. A great diversity of habitats and cultures is recognized. “Verticality” offers a unifying theme; characterizing the MC through ways in which life forms, ecosystems, and human settlement adjust to altitudinal zones, to upslope transitions, and the downslope cascades of moisture and geomorphic processes. These also give special importance to multi-hazard chains and long-runout processes including floods. Traditional mountain cultures exploit proximity and seasonality of different resources in the vertical, and avoidance of steepland dangers. This underscores sustainability and changing risk for the many surviving agro-pastoral and village economies and the special predicaments of indigenous cultures. Certain common stereotypes, such as remoteness or fragility of mountain habitats, require caution. They tend to overemphasize environmental determinism and underestimate social factors. Nor should they lead to neglect of wealthier, modernized areas, which also benefit most from geophysical research, dedicated agencies, and expert systems. However, modern developments now affect nearly all MC regions, bringing expanding dangers as well as benefits. Threats related to road networks are discussed, from mining and other large-scale resource extraction. Disaster losses and responses are also being rapidly transformed by urbanization. More broadly, highland–lowland relations can uniquely affect disaster risk, as do transboundary issues and initiatives in the mountains stemming from metropolitan centers. Anthropogenic climate warming generates dangers for mountain peoples but originates mainly from lowland activities. The extent of armed conflict affecting the MC is exceptional. Conflicts affect all aspects of human security. In the mountains as most other places, disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies have tended to favor emergency response. A human ecological approach emphasizes the need to pursue avoidance strategies, precautionary and capacity-building measures. Fundamental humanitarian concerns are essential in such an approach, and point to the importance of good governance and ethics.
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Gender-Based Violence and Disaster
Debra Parkinson
Gender-based violence (GBV) increases in disasters across the world. The extent of the increase is not consistently or accurately enumerated due to a number of factors: practical, methodological, ethical, and sociological. Nevertheless, 50 notable publications on GBV in disasters were identified in 14 single countries between 1993 and 2020, and 16 multicountry studies were identified between 1998 and 2018. Most publications in single countries were from the United States, while key multicountry publications were from the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the International Federation of Red Cross. Evidence to support the hypothesis of increased violence against women after disaster grew from the late 1980s, although by 2008, the question of whether GBV increases in disasters was still considered to be unanswered. Hurricane Katrina in the United States presented new opportunities to study GBV, and between 2008 and 2010, key papers were published on disasters across the world, all articulating the link between disaster and GBV. A common theme in the literature on violence against women in disasters is that it is evident worldwide. In countries as diverse as Iran, Pakistan, Japan, and Australia—although predisaster recorded levels of GBV may differ—there are commonalities of victim blaming, women’s sacrifice, and excusing men’s violence. By 2018, evidence had accumulated. Triggers, though not causes, of GBV were identified. After disasters, there is unsafe or insecure housing; substance abuse; stress, trauma, grief, and loss; relationship problems; unemployment and economic pressures; complex bureaucratic processes regarding grants, insurance, and rebuilding; reduced informal and formal supports and services; restricted movement and transport options; and a changed community and a different life course. Less identified as an explanation for GBV in disasters is the role of patriarchy and male privilege in allowing male violence against women and children. Despite the greater attention to GBV in disasters during the early 21st century, including through the United Nations and the World Health Organiztion, research remains fragmented, and emergency management across the world fails to address GBV in any effective, coordinated, or systematic way. Disasters indeed offer an excuse for men’s violence against women, and the deep disinterest in its relevance to disaster planning, response, or recovery is evidence that GBV after disaster is not seen as important. Women do not speak easily of the violence against them. In disasters, there is enormous pressure on women not to speak of men’s violence—from family members, friends, police, and even health professionals. The urgency of disaster response, the valorization of male heroism, and the complexity of postdisaster trauma and suffering challenge our commitment to the notion that women and children always have the right to live free from violence. Some effective initiatives to address increased GBV in disasters have been developed and indicate some progress. Recommendations for take-up and tailoring of these, along with embedded policy and practice changes, are clear. Until there are effective action and censure from the emergency management sector, from the legal processes, and from society, the vicious circle—of disaster followed by increased GBV and strengthened patriarchal power—will continue.
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Disasters, Climate Change, and Violence Against Women and Girls
Virginie Le Masson
Gender-based violence (GBV) is violence inflicted on someone because of their gender. It is also the worst manifestation of gender inequalities and discrimination against women and girls. Since the 1990s, the literature has increasingly documented how the combination of disaster impacts and the failure of protective systems (often unavailable in the first place) aggravates gender inequalities and violence against women and girls (VAWG). Sexual, physical, economic, psychological abuse, violence perpetrated by partners, trafficking, child marriage, and many different forms of VAWG are documented in a wide range of geographical locations at all stages of economic development. Far from being an “extraordinary” consequence of disasters, VAWG, particularly domestic abuse, reflects a continuum of a pervasive manifestation of inequality, violence, and discrimination.
GBV survivors are unlikely to report abuse or seek help, particularly when protection support is unavailable or inadequate. This discrepancy between the prevalence of violence and the lack of protection is exacerbated in the aftermath of a disaster and during crises due to environmental changes. Yet, although crucial to better examine the prevalence, trends, and consequences of VAWG during and after disasters, gender-disaggregated data are persistently missing from disaster risk assessments and vulnerability analyses of climate change impacts. Such data are also required to better support intersectional analyses of GBV occurring before, during, and after crises—that is, not just documenting the experiences of women and girls but also understanding changes in power relations and the social identities and conditions that influence the diversity of experiences among women and men, in addition to documenting the experiences of sexual and gender minorities.
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Disaster Risk Reduction and Furthering Women’s Rights
Supriya Akerkar
Traditional conceptions of disaster mitigation focus mainly on risk reduction practices using technology; however, disaster mitigation needs to be reconceptualized as a discursive and social intervention process in the disaster-development continuum to further women’s rights and equality and their emancipatory interests before, during, and after disasters. Such reconception would be more aligned with current formulations within the Sendai Framework of Action (2015–2030), which to an extent highlights the need to engage with gender inequalities through women’s leadership in disaster and development planning and the fifth UN Sustainable Development Goal on furthering gender equality. As discursive practices, disaster mitigation should question discrimination against and marginalization of women in disaster recoveries and development processes in different contexts. Discourse about women and gender is ingrained in the society and further perpetuated through regressive and patriarchal state policies and practices in the disaster-development continuum. A critical and progressive politics for women’s rights that furthers their equality would counter regressive discourses and their effects. Women experience discrimination through complex and multiple axes of power, such as race, class, ethnicity, and other social markers. Instead of treating women as a passive site for relief and recovery, nongovernmental organizations, both national and international, should work with women as persons with agency, voice, aspirations, and capacity to bring about policy and social change in the terrain of the disaster-development continuum. Critical humanitarianism and mobilizing women’s leadership would be a hallmark of such work. The relation between disaster mitigation and women’s rights is that of a virtuous cycle that calls for a synergy between disaster response and development goals to further women’s equality and rights. A vision for socially just and equal society must inform the relation between disaster mitigation and furthering women’s rights.
