Gender and Environmental Hazards

The human experience of environmental hazards is not only determined by forces in nature but also is contingent on social, political, economic, and cultural processes. An emergent literature in the hazards field emphasizes the concept of vulnerability, thereby drawing attention away from the “naturalness” of environmental hazards and toward the underlying reasons for the differences in exposure or impact that exist geographically. This work takes seriously several characteristics that mediate the vulnerability of individuals, households, and groups to risks and hazards. One important, yet relatively neglected, socially constructed characteristic influencing vulnerability to environmental hazards is gender. Gender interacts with age, class, caste, ethnicity, religion, economic position, and other underlying social processes to affect the conditions that influence exposure to hazardous situations in the environment. Gender is also a factor in governing the capacity of individuals or groups to respond to and cope with hazards’ harmful and damaging effects. As such, the intersections between gender and other social categories and distinctions need investigation and analysis.

New insights have emerged from research that employs gender as an analytical category in the study of environmental risks and hazards. On a conceptual level, several major gender dimensions have been highlighted. There are some biological and physiological differences between women and men that at times influence their exposure, susceptibility, and response to environmental hazards and their impact. The vulnerability of men and women is influenced by where they are in their respective life courses. Pregnant women and lactating mothers are examples of particularly vulnerable social groups. Moreover, the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on either women or men is not simply an outcome of biophysiological differences and varying physical exposures; it is an effect of vulnerability as determined by prevailing ideologies of femininity and masculinity that are reinforced through the social construction of gender roles, responsibilities, obligations, and opportunities. Social norms and roles of behavior and responsibility often place either women or men at greater risk from environmental hazards. Recent studies confirm that women generally suffer differential exposure to several serious hazards—fire used for cooking, indoor air pollution, toxic cleaning supplies, water contamination, and seismic activity that can destroy poorly constructed [Page 1187]dwellings—owing largely to the gender division of labor and space at the household scale. These divisions are the outcomes of the micropolitics of power at the household and community scales as well as wider social processes and structural inequalities. On the other hand, men dominate environmentally hazardous and dangerous occupations such as commercial fishing and logging, offshore oil drilling, and underground coal and mineral mining. Some exceptions exist to these patterns, depending on the type of environmental hazard, when gender roles may not affect women or men more adversely. Nevertheless, documentation from many places around the world suggests that gender vulnerability to environmental hazards is to a large extent the product of existing gender-based relations and/or inequalities. Another point in this regard is that prevailing gender norms can influence perceptions of hazards in addition to access to resources, education, information, skills, training, and employment. Hence, there are long-term consequences for individual and community efforts to mitigate hazardous situations and to create safer environments. These gender dimensions are not mutually exclusive but necessarily reinforce each other.

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