Gender and Hurricane Mitch: reconstructing subjectivities after ...

Gender and Hurricane Mitch: reconstructing subjectivities after disaster

Julie Cupples Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Much of the gender and disaster literature calls for more gender-sensitive disaster relief and research by focusing on the ways in which women are more vulnerable in a disaster or on their unique capabilities as community leaders or natural resource managers, which are often overlooked or underutilised in emergency management strategies. As well as seeking to overcome the (strategic) essentialism that is part of these calls and debates, this paper pays closer attention to gender identity and subjectivity as these are constructed and reworked through the disaster process to highlight the complexities and contradictions associated with women’s responses to a disaster. This focus, while crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of the gendered dimensions of disaster, also complicates attempts to create more gender-sensitive frameworks for disaster response. It draws on qualitative research conducted with a number of women in the wake of Hurricane Mitch (1998) in Nicaragua.

Keywords: development, disaster, gender, Hurricane Mitch, Nicaragua, subjectivity

Gender and disasterThe gender and disaster literature, which has been steadily growing over the past decade, has highlighted the way in which a significant proportion of disaster planning, management and research overlooks gender, despite recognition within social sciences generally that there exists a gendered dimension to the responses to any social event. Consequently, there is an acknowledged need to mainstream gender within disaster planning, management and research, as well as to take advantage of the windows of opportunity that are opened up (see, for example, Peacock, Morrow and Gladwin, 1997; Enarson and Morrow, 1997; 1998; Enarson, 1998; Fordham, 1998). While attention to gender is a crucial part of improving disaster response, relief and research, there is a danger of oversimplifying how gender shapes responses to disaster or is responsible for generating certain kinds of vulnerabilities or strengths. When gender is taken into account, it is often in terms of background quantitative charac-teristics that differentiate men and women (Bolin, Jackson and Grant, 1998) or of women’s short-term needs as mothers (Byrne and Baden, 1995). Frequently, much of this literature, in an attempt to rectify gender-blind conventional understanding of disasters, tends to focus on the different responses and coping mechanisms of men and women in the wake of a disaster. It highlights the ways in which women are often more vulnerable during disasters or the areas in which women have particular and regularly underutilised skills or strengths. While these ideas are useful in introducing greater gender sensitivity to political and development agendas and constitute a much needed

Disasters, 2007, 31(2): 155!175. © 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation © Overseas Development Institute, 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

doi:10.1111/j.0361-3666.2007.01002.x

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adjustment to previous gender-blind approaches, the gendered dynamics of disaster as they unfold in a certain location recurrently are not so straightforward. In many ways, the gender and disaster literature is beset by many of the problems that plague the Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD)1 paradigms, which, as a number of authors have argued (Bhavnani, Foran and Kurian, 2003; Chua, Bhavnani and Foran, 2002; Hyndman 1998), tend to homogenise and essentialise women, and ethnocentrically treat them as victims of their culture. Although GAD is now dominant in development research and practice, a tendency to revert to a WID focus has been noted in relief practice, where women are seen primarily as victims of emer-gencies, leading aid agencies to concentrate on their needs as mothers (Byrne and Baden, 1995). Gendered risk analyses often tend to essentialise further women, mark-ing sexual difference on their bodies and connecting their needs to reproduction. The difficulty of managing difference in humanitarian crises has been explored by Hyndman (1998, p. 255) who has argued that ‘[d]ifferences in culture and gender cannot simply be added onto an overarching framework of humanitarian assistance, nor can the development of a single set of gender policies be applicable to all humanitarian situ-ations’. As she goes on to state with respect to refugees, women ‘are not vulnerable in any essential way’ (Hyndman, 1998, p. 249). If we are then to acknowledge and productively engage with the gendered dimen-sions of the disaster, we must do so, as Fordham and Ketteridge (1998) assert, without resorting to stereotypical or deterministic notions of women’s needs and behaviours. One of the challenges we face in dealing with gender and disaster is how we can acknowledge difference (and shifting and multiple subjectivities) while simultaneously forging practical agendas for change (see Reed and Mitchell, 2003). This problematic became particularly salient in my work after Hurricane Mitch hit Nicaragua in October 1998. I believe we need to find a way to keep gender highly visible within the disaster process, while mobilising conceptualisations of gender and constructions of mascu-linity and femininity as temporary, shifting and precarious. This study attempts to move the focus away from women’s roles and relations to consider how participants’ involvement in the disaster process impacts on their sub-jectivities and leads to the destabilisation or reproduction of certain gender identities. It also explores how the experience of the disaster is shaped not only by pre-disaster vulnerabilities and forms of resilience but also by the discursive positioning facilitated by the disaster itself. After providing some background on Hurricane Mitch and its gendered dimen-sions as outlined in the literature to date, the paper is divided into two main sections. The first looks at the differences between the communities studied in terms of ability to reconstruct their homes, lives and livelihoods after the hurricane. It offers impor-tant contextual information for the second section, which provides a different layer of analysis by looking at the ways in which gendered subjectivities are reconstructed in the aftermath of disaster. It became clear that the hurricane survivors interviewed adopted a variety of sub-ject positions that at times were contradictory. Understanding this is central to both

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disaster relief practice and research. My research shows that while there were significant differences between the communities studied in relation to disaster response, they were perhaps not as noteworthy as the differences between individuals, even between those that on a superficial level seemed to have many characteristics in common and might lead us to assume that they would therefore share particular vulnerabilities and strengths. As Buranakul et al. (2005, p. 247) have argued with respect to the December 2004 Asian tsunami, in events of this magnitude which are driven by ‘the demands of the moment’, crucial ‘eddies of difference’ can become obscured from view. While a major disaster often undermines or fragments existing gender identities, it can also facilitate new sub-jectivities that might be more or less empowering for the women concerned. What appears to be important, however, is the extent to which discursive positionings facili-tated by the disaster process intersect and interact with previous experiences as workers, farmers, political activists, single mothers or victims of domestic violence. These under-standings complicate the attempt to impart a more gender sensitive framework that relief workers and agencies can deploy following a disaster.2

This article draws on qualitative research conducted with 12 participants in urban and rural communities in the department of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, who were displaced or made homeless by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. It formed part of a broader doctoral study that explored the intersections between motherhood, work and political activ-ism, in which a total of 33 women were interviewed (see Cupples, 2002). Participants were recruited via local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in affected communities. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in the urban commu-nities of El Mirador, El Tambor and Barrio Richardson and in the rural communities of Apantillo Siares and El Hatillo. Interviewing began in mid-1999 when many par-ticipants were still living in makeshift shelters and contributing to the reconstruction of their communities and homes. Participants were interviewed between two and four times each in 1999 and 2001. A number of women in El Tambor and Apantillo Siares had joined the Movement of Single and Unemployed Mothers formed just after the hurricane to try to seek sustainable sources of employment for hurricane survivors. In all of the communities with the exception of El Mirador, people attempted to rebuild homes and livelihoods in the same location. El Mirador, however, was a community created after the hurri-cane through a housing project led by a local NGO, the Communal Movement. In this community, therefore, people from different parts of Matagalpa who did not know each other were brought together following the disaster. In the rural communities studied, participants had lost crops and livestock as well as homes. Roads and bridges granting important access to nearby towns had also been destroyed.

Gender and Hurricane MitchHurricane Mitch caused widespread devastation when it hit Nicaragua and Honduras in October 1998. Despite warnings from meteorologists on the destructive potential of the hurricane, the Nicaraguan government failed to notify people living in its path

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or to evacuate high-risk areas. The hurricane produced torrential rain for five days over the Honduras–Nicaragua border where it met with a strong anti-cyclone that prevented it from advancing. Unprecedented levels of precipitation caused massive flooding and landslides. Hurricane Mitch claimed the lives of some 11,000 people in Central America, 3,000 of them in Nicaragua. Disease spread in the days after the hurri-cane owing to the contamination of the water supply by pesticides and chemical waste, the decomposition of human and animal corpses, and by the hundreds of latrines that had overflowed during flooding, a situation that caused the Ministry of Health to declare an epidemic emergency. In total, in Nicaragua, the hurricane directly affected 865,700 people, amounting to 20 per cent of the entire population. The majority of these were left homeless, their houses, livestock, agricultural machinery and crops destroyed. Infrastructure losses, in particular damage to roads, bridges, power lines and sewerage systems, were consider-able. The government estimated the cost of reconstruction and rehabilitation to be approximately USD 1.4 billion. International aid pledges to Nicaragua and other parts of Central America after Mitch were substantial. However, of the USD 25 billion pledged by individual and institutional donors, USD 11 billion had already been earmarked during talks in Geneva, Switzerland, the previous year (Brown, 2000). It has been suggested that aid pledged by the United States was not out of humanitarian concern but out of fear that thou-sands of desperate and unemployed Central Americans would migrate to the US (Kettle, 1998). Actual delivery of the aid promised was painfully slow (Fonseca and Orozco, 1999; Mairena Martínez, 1999; Majano, 1999). The US aid package stalled during lengthy conflicts over the federal budget (Brown, 2000), while The Guardian Weekly reported in May 2000 that 18 months after Mitch, not a single penny of the USD 180 million promised by the European Union (EU) had been spent (Black, 2000). In addition, local NGOs complained at the way in which the Nicaraguan government centralised and politicised the distribution of aid3 (Vargas, 1999) and the way in which it put emphasis on public infrastructure, particularly road building, rather than on social needs (Delaney and Schrader, 2000). There is no doubt that the aid distribution was irregular and that it did not take into account the social heterogeneity of parts of the country (Equipo Nitlapán-Envío, 1999). A survey conducted by the Civil Coalition for Emergency and Reconstruction (CCER)—formed after the hurricane by 350 NGOs and civil society organisations—one year after Mitch indicated that 60 per cent of those asked believed that the govern-ment had done nothing to help survivors. In addition, more than 70 per cent of those who did receive help had received it from an NGO, while only nine per cent received help from the central government (CCER, 1999c). Approximately one-half (about 400,000) of the Nicaraguans affected by Mitch received food aid through the Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation of the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations (UN) (Sánchez, 1999; WFP, 1999). As others have commented, gender-sensitive disaster relief was absent after Hurricane Mitch (CCER, 1999a; Delaney and Schrader, 2000; Bradshaw, 2001; 2002). According


to Delaney and Schrader (2000), NGOs’ lack of institutional familiarity with disaster and social risk undermined attention to gender. Even those organisations that had a strong history of gender programmes and policies tended to put gender aside in relief work because of the need to move quickly, while organisations that did possess techni-cal expertise in short-term disaster relief and rehabilitation showed great resistance to gender analysis. The analysis by Bradshaw (2001) of a social audit of the reconstruction process conducted by the CCER suggests that one ramification of Mitch has been the reinforcement of ‘traditional’ women’s roles. In the view of this author, Mitch clearly had a negative impact on women’s productive activities and employment is undoubtedly central to tackling disaster vulnerabilities and ability to recover. Such insights are crucial in understanding why gender is often ignored in both hazard management and disaster relief. They also highlight the need for more research that explores the gendered dimen-sions of disaster in Nicaragua and elsewhere. However, incorporating gender in a way that addresses gendered inequalities without resorting to essentialist understandings of men and women is fraught with complexities. Some of the more quantitatively-oriented studies conducted after Mitch (for example, CCER, 1999b; 1999c; Bradshaw, 2004) have tended to paint a more general and on the whole more negative picture of the recovery process and its gendered dimensions, which while important obscures the specificity of lived disaster experiences. This approach tends to view a major disaster such as a hurri-cane in terms of its ‘impacts’, rather than the multiple and complex ways in which it is endured and negotiated by survivors. It is not possible to say that women, because they are women, will behave or respond to a disaster in a particular way. Even women with similar superficial background characteristics will not react to the same event in the same manner. Qualitative and ethnographically informed scholarship is able to give rise to more nuanced and differen-tiated understandings of the relationship between gender and disaster. The next section provides more detailed information on the five communities studied, which will help the reader to gain some sense of the contexts in which gender identities were renego-tiated because of the hurricane.

Reconstructing communitiesThere were quite clear differences in how communities were able to cope with and recover from Mitch. Indeed, the five communities studied responded to the disaster in different ways, showing quite different levels of solidarity, political mobilisation, aid dependency and post-disaster conflict. Part of the explanation for this lies in the circum-stances in which reconstruction took place and the amount and form of aid received. While Barrio Richardson is a well-established part of urban Matagalpa, El Tambor is an illegal settlement that resulted from a land invasion by migrants from rural areas in 1995. Attempted evictions had been unsuccessful, and the settlement, while tolerated to some extent by the authorities, had still not been legalised at the time of this research. Some communities such as El Hatillo had high levels of community cohesion before the hurricane that increased their disaster resilience considerably. Indeed, the most

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organised communities seemed to be not only the most resilient ones but also those more effective at attracting aid. In this regard, El Hatillo stood out quite significantly. El Hatillo was a community that displayed extraordinarily high levels of social mobilisation and cohesion and in which aid was put to its best possible use. The women in particu-lar were organised into women’s groups and participated in multiple forms of disaster work (Enarson, 2001), such as clearing roads, building new houses, constructing gabions to protect the riverbanks, growing vegetables, running a communal kitchen and refor-esting the hillsides. While aid dependency was evident and the challenges in terms of poverty, gender discrimination and environmental risk remained huge, there was a high degree of optimism about the future. Indeed, the women of El Hatillo saw themselves as strategically reproducing normative gender relations in the interests of more long-term emancipation and development aid was deployed as a motivating factor and a source of empowerment4—for a detailed description of the situation of El Hatillo after Mitch, see Cupples, 2004a. In this respect, the situation in El Mirador was very different. As stated, El Mirador came into being through a housing project led primarily by a Nicaraguan NGO, the Communal Movement, which also created a communal kitchen (comedor) to provide a daily hot meal to all children under 12.5 In 1999, the inhabitants of El Mirador were receiving food aid through the WFP, which ended its activities in July 2001 (WFP, 1999). This operation supplied sugar, rice, pulses and oil periodically to each household as well as some of the staples for the comedor. There was no electricity or piped water when I arrived there in 1999. The residents were dependent on water vendors and were usually unable to buy more than one or two buckets per household per day, which they reserved primarily for drinking or cooking. To wash clothes or to bathe involved a 30-minute walk to the river. Not long after they moved into their houses, electricity was obtained by tapping illegally into the electricity supply. Despite the NGO presence in El Mirador, there was great uncertainty about the future. Unlike El Hatillo, no development plans had been formulated within the com-munity. Many of the inhabitants had either lost their jobs because of the hurricane or they were forced to put income-earning activities on hold in order to contribute their labour to the building project. Disaster scholars have highlighted how the disaster process, if not managed carefully, can produce aid dependency and reproduce or re-inforce gender inequality. Both aid dependency and reinforcement of existing gender inequalities were evident at El Mirador. While the quantity of aid pledged and the way it is distributed are crucial aspects of any disaster process, it is also important to consider the complex way in which aid impacts on beneficiaries. While I believe that aid is essential for people who have lost homes and livelihoods, a number of authors have suggested that its arrival in a disaster-stricken area can have potentially harmful effects, replacing solidarity with self-interest or generating dependencies that reduce people’s abilities to cope with future emergen-cies (Morren, 1983; Oliver-Smith, 1986; 1999; Maskrey, 1989; Hoffman, 1999; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, 1999). The beneficiaries in El Mirador demonstrated a more marked level of dependency, not just on aid itself but also on individuals within the Communal Movement. Although


the inhabitants of this community had survived a major disaster, they did at times dis-play an inability to fend for themselves. Shortly after the latrines had been completed after months of having no sanitation, strong winds brought down some of the surround-ing boards. Rather than attempting simple repairs following what was, according to Communal Movement leaders, a relatively minor setback, many people said that they needed to call the Communal Movement to ask one of its leaders to organise the fix-ing of the latrines. Likewise, when one woman’s son became very sick with diarrhoea, she waited for someone from the Communal Movement to come and decide what to do rather than taking him to the health centre. Four days passed before anyone arrived, and the mother did not take her child to the health centre. By the time some-one did come, the boy’s health had deteriorated enormously and he was experiencing dangerously high levels of dehydration.6 Communal Movement leader Sergio Saénz explained how the situation in El Mirador was particularly challenging to the organisa-tion and how these challenges became particularly evident after the coffee slump of 2001,7 when the Communal Movement felt torn between providing yet more food aid, which would likely create more dependency, and trying to encourage greater self-reliance and mobilisation. A number of women who had received sewing machines from the Communal Movement in order to provide them with a source of income sold them during the slump. Effectively, they deprived themselves of a more long-term source of income and were only able to meet immediate needs with the proceeds.8

In addition, the reconstruction process itself in El Mirador seemed to disadvantage women, particularly through the way it affected their productive capacities and its failure to provide them with any transferable skills. Marcia Picado, for instance, lost her job at a coffee processing plant (beneficio) during Mitch because of the destruction of the crop. When I met her, she had been employed by the Communal Movement to manage the comedor alongside a changing rota of unpaid volunteers. She was paid C$4009 a month, about one-half of what she would have earned working at the beneficio, but with shorter hours and no travelling. Ramona Dávila, meanwhile, had always worked in the informal sector, making and selling nacatamales (a corn and meat dish) or more recently selling lottery tickets. The requirement that she contribute her labour to the construction project meant that she was forced to suspend her lottery selling, and so she attempted to generate a small amount of cash income by making and selling tortillas at home. The situation was precarious in El Mirador, because while the residents had new homes, most families lacked stable means of earning a living. Employment is of course crucial to addressing the vulnerabilities that caused these women to become disaster victims or damnificadas. Marcia Picado made this point clear:

I suffered in the hurricane as I am suffering now, because if I imagine . . . well, on the one hand we are better off because we are in the house, but on the other, we are not contented because we are unemployed. You know that to live here in one room, to be all right what we need is a job, not just a payment, because all they gave me there [in the comedor] was 400 córdobas.10

In El Mirador, project beneficiaries were all obliged to provide 66 days of labour in return for a house. This condition meant that women and men were equally required

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to carry out construction work. In addition, the Communal Movement employed skilled labourers to help build the houses and to train non-skilled beneficiaries. Having so many Nicaraguan women engaged in construction work on a building site could be interpreted, superficially, as a challenge to more traditional gender relations. However, closer examination revealed that a marked gendered division of labour existed, with women primarily fetching and carrying sand, water, and bricks and men erecting rein-forced rods, bricklaying and carrying out carpentry and woodwork. In terms of gender relations, despite their high visibility in the normative male space of the building site, women were actually further marginalised by their involvement in the project. The con-struction project failed to build on women’s existing skills or supply them with new ones, and the requirement to contribute labour to the project meant that they were unable to engage in paid work. Some of the male beneficiaries would also have had to afford it priority over paid employment but they would at least have gained valuable skills that could attract them paid work. The majority of women learned no transferable skills. In this case, a good opportunity to impart women with skills in carpentry and masonry was lost. Working on the construction site did not bring much in the way of satisfaction. Marcia Picado said:

It was hard . . . for someone who isn’t used to it. Because I am not used to that sort of work, before the hurricane I worked in business. I used to sell jewellery. Before, life for me was easier, not like this.11

Compared with El Hatillo, levels of solidarity and cooperation in El Mirador were at a much lower level and the amount of conflict was not insignificant. Marcia felt that she had become the target of hostility in the community because she had been given a paid position in the comedor whereas other women were expected to donate their labour for free on a rotational basis. The lack of solidarity in El Mirador also extended to physical assault by one woman on another. While it cannot be assumed that women will automatically unite with other women in need (Serrat Viñas, 1998), the situation was qualitatively different from that of El Hatillo, where support networks were well established and the community had a long history of organisation. In El Mirador, not only did the design of the location force a spatial realignment of political groupings,12 but also the hurricane displaced people there. Consequently, they had to rebuild their lives and their support networks with people they did not know and do so at a time when the presence of aid and other associated benefits, such as the job of managing the comedor, could have a potentially divisive effect and create new forms of dependency. Marcia Picado continually complained about the conflicts at the kitchen and after a few months, she resigned:

To tell you the truth, I am more than willing, but as I have said, there are people who are not at all understanding, they slag you off, you can give them your heart, but they talk about you behind your back and I don’t like that. Well, I am willing, I am the one in charge. And they told me that in this comedor, nobody should interfere, because you are the one in charge. But people are not at all understanding.13


Some of these complexities were also evident in the other communities studied. The participants who were not part of the more formalised aid projects in El Mirador and El Hatillo perceived a great deal of injustice in the way aid was distributed and did not receive some of the aid they expected or had been promised. One member of the Move-ment of Single and Unemployed Mothers said:

And the donations that they brought to the school [evacuation centre], they took them to the town hall, pairs of shoes, that they didn’t give to anyone, clothes too collected by the evangelical priests, also . . . there was a package and they took things out and took them to the town hall and the things are there stagnating and they are not giving them to anybody . . . And some of the donations that they gave to Guanuca, they took things out, they took out the sardines, the spaghetti and the oil. And they gave out other things, some beans that were so hard that they never cooked even using heaps of firewood, and some rice. They gave out four pounds of rice, four pounds of beans and three bars of soap, but they took out the spaghetti, the oil and the sardines. There is no relief for the hurricane victims.14

Likewise, a participant from Barrio Richardson, Lydia Sánchez, complained about the inadequacy of aid. She believed that the donations given to Nicaragua by inter-national agencies were sufficient, but they found their way on to the markets for sale. She said that her son’s school informed parents that all primary school children were to receive a uniform and a backpack containing exercise books and pencils in time for the new school year, but it never happened. The Red Cross also gave her a ticket to procure items of clothing:

I didn’t go, I sent my brother, and all they gave him was a heap of rags, of old clothes that were no use.15

A falling tree destroyed Lydia’s house but she received no aid from either the govern-ment or an NGO with which to rebuild. When I met her she had taken out a loan from her employer to make partial improvements and was having to meet monthly payments of C$260 (from a total monthly income of C$900). To make ends meet, she took on additional ironing work on Saturdays. There was no NGO presence or government aid in Apantillo Siares, despite the fact that families in this community had lost homes and crops. The community had no electricity, no piped water, no latrines, no school and no health centre and the road to Matagalpa had become impassable for normal vehicles. However, the absence of food or other aid here did not generate a high level of self-reliance and neighbours were constantly in conflict with one another:

There is nothing here. Here we are like animals. No organisation came here, like in other places, where they set up, what do they call them? Committees which have a particular job to do. Here there is nothing, there is nothing to do here.16

Significant differences existed, therefore, in how hurricane survivors were able to reconstruct their communities and these responses have important gender dimensions.

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The disaster process in El Mirador and Apantillo Siares clearly differed from that of El Hatillo, where there was a much higher degree of cooperation and solidarity and more optimism about the future. In part, the ability to recover and rebuild from a major disaster depends on pre-disaster levels of community solidarity as well as more access to key resources such as aid and sources of income. To some extent, as Bradshaw (2001) has stated, the hurricane reinforced existing gender inequalities.17 It is clear that a major disaster like Hurricane Mitch has the power to undermine or fragment existing gender identities. To a degree, women’s identities as mothers were under-mined in El Mirador by the need to send their children to the comedor to eat. Some women said that they would not like the comedor to be a long-term project as it is better for children to eat in their own home. Their identities as paid workers were also under-mined by the unemployment caused by the disaster. Women lost jobs in coffee pro-cessing plants because of the destruction of the crop or were forced to suspend their agricultural production or informal sector work to dedicate themselves to house building and other reconstruction initiatives. However, the disaster process can also provide space for empowerment as women become actively involved in repair and reconstruction, through disaster response groups. A closer examination of the relationship between gender and disaster, though, reveals not only important gender differences on a national, regional or community level, but also that the response to the hurricane differed among women. The following section looks at how the process of becoming homeless and politically active following a disaster can lead to divergent subjectivities among survivors.

Reconstructing subjectivitiesAs stated, most of the participants interviewed who were affected by Mitch were made homeless by the hurricane. This was the case with many in El Hatillo and Apantillo Siares and those people who ended up in El Mirador. As noted, the amount of NGO support for rebuilding varied considerably from one community to another and not all of those made homeless by the hurricane received aid to rebuild homes. Houses are easily destroyed in disasters in Nicaragua because often they do not have foundations, are constructed of adobe dirt bricks without plaster or flimsy materials, and/or are built in precarious locations such as on hillsides or volcano slopes or next to lakes and rivers. But housing in Nicaragua is precarious even in the absence of a dis-aster and much confusion surrounds the question of property and ownership (Cupples, 1992). Under the Sandinistas, which overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in July 1979 and governed Nicaragua in the 1980s, land on which to farm and to build a home was widely distributed through both the revolutionary government’s agrarian reform programme and government-aided squatter settlements. However, many people did not possess legal titles to the land they were occupying. Since the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in February 1990, much confusion has surrounded the issue of owner-ship, with former proprietors returning from exile to reclaim land, and the US attempt-ing to make aid conditional on the return of land to former holders. The situation


was made even more complex by the fact that 20 per cent of the land distributed by the Sandinistas was dispersed in the three months after the electoral defeat, that is, during the transition period. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) leader-ship in particular benefited from this process, which became known as the piñata,18 and it provided substantial political ammunition to those on the Right wishing to reverse the gains of the revolution. Hurricane Mitch caused widespread homelessness, but for many Nicaraguans hous-ing insecurity is not a one-off situation generated by a hurricane or earthquake. Living without secure housing is a constant feature of many people’s lives in Nicaragua. One family in Apantillo Siares rebuilt their house after the hurricane on a plot of land they had bought four years earlier for C$300 (USD 25) but they had no legal documents to prove it was theirs. Consequently, they were under constant pressure from the former owner who was attempting to recover the land. At the time of the hurricane, Marcia Picado and Ramona Dávila were both low-income single mothers in their mid-thirties. They both relocated to the Communal Movement housing settlement at El Mirador after rising waters claimed their homes on the banks of the Río Grande. As the following discussion shows, Marcia and Ramona superficially shared characteristics of gender, class, age, ethnicity, marital status, parent-hood, negative experiences of expressions of masculinity and temporary homelessness. They diverged however in the construction of their subjectivities as these were reshaped through the processes of disaster and recovery. While Ramona expressed much satisfac-tion about the positive changes in her life that had come about since the hurricane, Marcia’s view of her life was much more negative and she appeared not to have ex-perienced a positive shift in her gender identity. She became nostalgic not about the time before the hurricane but about the time before her husband left them. For Ramona, acquiring a house in El Mirador brought a degree of housing stability to her life for the first time. As a small child, Ramona lived with her parents and younger siblings on a large estate, where her father was employed as a foreman. In 1976, when Ramona was 10 years old, Somoza’s guard killed her father after his boss denounced him for collaborating with the Sandinistas. Subsequently, the entire family was thrown off the estate and had nowhere to go. Ramona described those difficult years when they were effectively homeless, moving about in search of employment and somewhere to live. In that period, all of the children contracted measles, from which two of her 11 siblings died. After the triumphant revolution of 1979, the Sandinistas offered her mother a house in return for her husband’s sacrifice for the revolutionary cause, which out of pride she turned down, because it would be ‘like consuming her husband’s blood’. Instead, her mother worked as a cook on a farm and saved enough money to buy a small plot of land in Pantasma on which to build a house. The revolution led to a war with US-backed Contra rebels that raged during the 1980s. Pantasma was a dangerous place to live during that war and was the site of a massive Contra massacre in 1982. Contras kidnapped Ramona’s brother and then tortured him before his release. Ramona, a teenager at the time, spent more than 24 hours hiding under the floorboards of a neighbour’s house to avoid discovery by the

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Contras. When the war ended in 1990, by which time Ramona had a partner and three children, returning Nicaraguans evicted them from the land on which they were living, claiming it was confiscated territory. Ramona and her partner were then involved in the illegal seizure of land on the riverbank in Matagalpa and with the help of Sandinista lawyers managed to secure its legalisation. They built a house there but El Niño-related floods destroyed it in 1997. With the help of the Red Cross, they managed to rebuild. During Hurricane Mitch, the river flooded and filled their house with water in the middle of the night. Some of the houses in this community were made of brick (and hence were sturdier), but Ramona’s house was made of wood and could not withstand the strong currents. All of her children managed to get out safely with their father except for her fifth child, Orlando, whom she had ‘adopted’ just before the hurricane.19 Ramona stayed behind to look for him. At this point, the electricity failed and the scene was plunged into darkness. The neighbours outside called on her to get out, as the entire house was starting to move and was about to be swept away. Suddenly, Ramona remembered that there was a pile of mango wood in the corner of the house, which she described to me as a ‘message from God’. She scrambled around until she felt the boy’s legs sticking out of the top, his face buried in the firewood and the water. She grabbed him by the legs, pulled him out and extricated the house with seconds to spare before it disappeared down the river. Orlando was badly injured but survived. After Mitch, Ramona was homeless once again, now with five children to support. Her partner of 16 years who was an alcoholic and had been violent left them at this stage and never returned. She said the following about the abusive relationship she never felt able to escape from until the hurricane:

He used to drink liquor and when I was out selling, he used to come and ask me for money and if I didn’t give it to him, he would hit me. He was always asking me for money to buy liquor. All my friends used to tell me not to be so stupid, that I should try and leave him, but he would always look for me and tell me that if I tried to leave him, he would kill me. He used to lock me in the house and beat me. My mum couldn’t help out because he used to get so angry, you can’t imagine. He had such a bad temper. And I put up with him for 16 years.20

By the end of 1999, Ramona had legal title to a house in the El Mirador settlement, which despite her ongoing difficulties was a source of great satisfaction:

After the hurricane, we were sheltered at the Red Cross, then we were at the Fire Station, and then in the sports stadium. When we saw that we’d been made homeless, he left. He headed into the mountains towards Waslala. He got lost and that was for the best. Then they gave me the house and now we are so happy, thank God.21

This case study raises issues about how we conceptualise houses and homes in the context of disasters. A study by Fordham (1998) in Scotland highlighted how flooding was distressing to survivors because it undermined the notion of home as haven and a place of safety. Shurmer-Smith and Hannan (1994) have written about how the often


private nature of the home endows it with a semi-mystical force. The ideological nature of this force allows the drudgery of domestic work or issues like domestic violence to escape public scrutiny. However, a home with a precarious existence undermines this force. A house that is washed away in minutes by a rising river or reclaimed by a previous owner is in a sense politicised and very much opened up to public scrutiny. It cannot remain a private refuge separate from the public or political domain. Further-more, the process of becoming homeless and the condition of homelessness impact on an individual’s understanding of identity in multiple ways. Identities can, as a result, become fragmented or fractured or they can shift in a more positive manner. Accord-ing to Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999), when people lose a home, it raises issues related to place attachment, self and social definition (see also Fordham, 1998). For Ramona, her new home with its legal title and the end of the domestic violence she suffered prior to the hurricane, as well as having rescued Orlando a second time, appear to have brought about a more positive sense of self. Disasters are frequently seen as bringing about increases in domestic violence and indeed, after Hurricane Mitch, civil society organisations did report higher incidences (Puntos de Encuentro, 1999; Delaney and Schrader, 2000; Montenegro, 2004). But in Ramona’s case, the hurricane brought an end to a long-term violent relationship. The sense of happiness expressed by Ramona was also to be found in the narratives of some of the women in El Hatillo. Both Silvia Montiel and Rosa Laviana expressed a positive sense of self as well as a feeling of liberation due to the empowerment possi-bilities that have emerged through political mobilisation, related to the hurricane and more broadly (Cupples, 2004a). Marcia Picado’s reflections on the hurricane and her understanding of it are very different from those of Ramona’s at El Mirador and those of Silvia Montiel and Rosa Laviana at El Hatillo. Marcia’s ‘crisis’ really began not with the hurricane but when her husband left her four years previously for another woman when she was pregnant with their sixth child and suffering from dengue fever. Subsequently she worked to support her family, taking in washing or ironing, buying and selling jewellery and doing seasonal work in the coffee processing plants. Her move to El Mirador provided her with a more solid house and empowerment opportunities. Not only was she given the role of managing the comedor but also she was elected treasurer of the community committee. However, rather than feeling more empowered, Marcia’s condition as a damnificada (disaster victim) accorded her the discursive capability to incorporate suf-fering into her gender identity, to see herself not as a survivor, but as a victim, as a long-suffering woman, or mujer sufrida.22 This position of suffering, while related to and a consequence of material deprivation, was also socially constructed, and came about because of discursive positioning facilitated by the disaster. Not all women in the after-math of the disaster will adopt that stance—this did not apply to Ramona, for instance, who conceptualised material deprivation differently and displayed a much greater degree of optimism about the future. Marcia’s view of herself as a mujer sufrida can be seen in the way in which she evaluated her life before the hurricane and in the way she played down her role as treasurer after the hurricane:

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Life was too hard for me when I was there. Every Saturday I had to wash a huge sackful of clothes. And iron them. But when I separated from my husband, the same thing happened, I had to work hard. I have suffered a lot.23

The only thing I do is act as treasurer . . . If we need to pay someone, or transfer some money, it is my job to pay. That is all.24

The danger of this kind of subject positioning is that it can generate new kinds of dependencies25 and make recovery more difficult. Furthermore, it demonstrates that when disaster comes into contact with a heterogeneously vulnerable population, not only does it have a differentiated effect on the members of that population depending on their pre-disaster vulnerabilities, but also it sets in motion a process that in itself can generate new heterogeneities and lead to the emergence of new gender or other social identities. Hence the divergence of subjectivities among hurricane survivors as demon-strated by the differences between Marcia and Ramona. However, the ways in which gender identities are formulated and reformulated can also be profoundly contradictory. Elsa Jirón had migrated to Matagalpa from a rural community and was living in El Tambor. Her house was also partially destroyed in the hurricane. After Mitch, she joined the Movement of Single and Unemployed Mothers. As the following quotes demonstrate, Elsa displayed both of the above discur-sive positions—she was aware of herself as a mujer sufrida and simultaneously happy about the ‘liberation’ brought by social mobilisation:

I have suffered; I am long-suffering. I can tell you for example that I don’t have a bed to sleep in, I sleep on the ground, yes I sleep on the ground, I sleep on the ground, the ground is where I sleep.26

I feel really happy, when I first came here, I didn’t know . . . when I lived elsewhere, I didn’t know what an organisation was at all, but not today. Today I am in the area of Matagalpa, in this town of Matagalpa, and I feel really happy. I have woken up, I feel happy, because I have learnt a bit more, although I don’t know how to read, but I have learnt a bit. I give thanks to God that I have learnt something, and I feel really happy because I am working in this Movement of Single Mothers.27

Dominant disaster paradigms and quantitative measurements do not really explain the diverse and multiple forms of disaster response and their gendered dimensions. Disaster and reconstruction can often unleash a series of contradictory processes—positive, negative and contradictory—particularly in terms of the ways in which gender relations and identities are constructed. In Nicaragua, these processes play out against a backdrop of more constant upheaval brought about by structural adjustment, political instability, environmental degradation and socio-cultural norms that constrain women’s behaviour or their ability to make decisions. These narratives suggest that a gender-sensitive disaster analysis has to go beyond generalised or generalisable notions of gendered vulnerabilities in order to explain and address the reconfigurations of self that emerge.


Women move in and out of states of resistance and accommodation, of vulnerability and strength, and of self-sacrifice and self-assertion. This dynamism occurs because there are a number of identities active at a given time and the boundaries between them are very fluid. Consequently, Marcia Picado adopted a position of victimhood despite the empowerment opportunities presented to her, while Elsa Jirón simultaneously adopted a position of suffering and one of political organisation. The fashion in which Ramona Dávila’s and Marcia Picado’s subjectivities diverged during the processes of disaster and recovery, despite superficially sharing similar background characteristics, demonstrates clearly how suffering is determined by the intersections between disaster-related subjectivities (such as being a damnificada) and other subjectivities which emerge from and relate to understandings of motherhood or relationships with men. The inter-sections that become meaningful at a given time or place, and by this I mean the models of subjectivity that are taken up, will differ between individuals and cannot there-fore necessarily be predicted. If women do not succumb to the negative aspects of identities of victimhood, then gender identities might be reworked to bring them into line with reformulated political identities. Hurricane Mitch was a disaster that brought much suffering, but because in a Catholic culture images of suffering mothers evoke strength as well as weakness, the disaster allowed some women to re-imagine certain aspects of self in affirmative ways. This was particularly evident in the cases of Silvia Montiel and Rosa Laviana. But if, for example, the disaster situation prevents women from working—Marcia Picado and Ramona Dávila both lost their jobs because of Mitch—and development interventions are focused on food aid and childcare—as in El Mirador—it might be more productive to adopt a victim mentality to appeal to aid agencies, a process that is more likely to lead to aid dependency than self-reliance. Even though women are disadvantaged by the existence of essentialist cultural constructions, they also draw on these notions, sometimes strategically and often unconsciously, to make sense of their lives and to construct their subjectivities in ways that are discursively present. Therefore, the dis-aster process constitutes a space in which gender can be performed differently, or in which hegemonic gender identities can be used strategically. The post-Mitch scenario in the researched communities provides clear evidence not only of the differences between communities but also of the differences between indi-viduals. Thus, it is impossible to produce prescriptive recommendations for development practice. Attention to context and principally to the geographies at play is fundamental. This is why the arrival of aid in a given context is complex in terms of its ability to generate self-esteem or empowerment among beneficiaries. Development aid in El Hatillo acts as a motivating factor and is an important source of female empowerment (Cupples, 2004a). Aid in El Mirador, though, has had a disabling impact, generating dependencies that prevent people from making repairs to their homes or taking a sick child to the doctor. These outcomes constitute serious challenges to Nicaraguan NGOs like the Communal Movement in their attempts to provide aid that leads to indepen-dence and empowerment.

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ConclusionDisaster researchers and practitioners, as well as striving to provide more politically contextualised understanding of the disaster and establish a focus on women’s vulnera-bilities and strengths during a disaster, should also consider other dimensions. We should explore the discursive positions facilitated by the disaster and consider how are these taken up and/or resisted. We should then ponder how they intersect with or destabilise other identities and inequalities of race, ethnicity, class, age or physical ability. This means thinking more carefully about how the disaster experience intersects with sur-vivors’ previous life experiences and other social or political positionings. In this case, it became clear that homelessness caused by eviction for political reasons shapes the experience of homelessness due to environmental disaster. These experiences are gen-dered in multiple ways and affect how understandings of house, home and homelessness are constructed and reworked. These explorations might enable us to identify more clearly the possibilities for empowerment of marginalised people generated by the relief process and to comprehend why some women emerge empowered and stronger from such processes, while others become more desperate and victimised. In attempting to contribute to post-disaster reconstruction, development practitioners need to understand not only that vulnerabilities are culturally constructed as well as created by extreme events such as a hurricane, but also that these processes have a spa-tial logic of their own. This means that, while the material outcomes of such processes may indeed be negative and must be addressed through aid and other development interventions, the spatial shifts that accompany these processes reveal potentialities that women might be able to exploit within a process of identity renegotiation. Therefore, rather than concentrate exclusively on what a disaster does to women, it is more produc-tive to focus on how women feel about and reflect on the spatial realignments resulting from these events or processes and on the ways in which they constrain and facilitate. Becoming homeless, for example, represents a negative spatial shift in an individual’s life, but for Ramona Dávila it also brought freedom from a violent relationship, spiri-tual revitalisation and a renewed sense of optimism. The interweaving of material relations and symbolic meaning in women’s lives means that a focus on the material and neglect of the symbolic will overlook how women often cope with the former by renegotiating the latter. In El Hatillo, awareness of the constraints caused by ongoing poverty did not prevent women from assuming positions of political leadership and new positive subjectivities in relation to their own bodies. Even when material circum-stances are desperate, there is space for dissent. Relief practice, along with GAD interventions more broadly, would benefit from a greater understanding of gender identity as precarious (see Cupples, 2005). Even in contexts of hardship or disaster, which impose a series of constraints on women’s lives, gender is still variable and unstable as a category and its instability frequently increases in such environments. Women’s experiences of disaster or other social difficulties, such as struggles for landownership, domestic violence or structural adjustment, are built on a multiplicity of discourses. Consequently, women do not necessarily show solidarity with other women in need nor do they necessarily respond to disaster and other difficulties


in the same way because they are women. Even when women are disadvantaged by their greater vulnerability in the context of a disaster, their gender identities are still subject to change. The outcomes of disaster for gender are therefore multifaceted and reconstruction can often unleash a series of contradictory processes particularly with regard to the ways in which gender identities are constructed. While certain life conditions are common to many participants and these conditions do generate identifiable gendered vulnera-bilities, there are a number of other factors that give rise to more complex disaster outcomes, such as responses to aid, experiences of homelessness, level of social mobili-sation, and, in particular, the way in which these processes contribute to the construction of meaning. The post-hurricane recovery and reconstruction process and its interface with social conditions and lived experiences give rise to a context in which gender identities are sometimes renegotiated. By switching to a focus on gender identities, a more detailed understanding can be gained of the gendered dimensions of disaster and of the broader contingencies that shape and influence disaster-related subjectivities.

CorrespondenceJulie Cupples, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Department of Geography, Uni-versity of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Telephone: +64 3 364 2987 ext. 8116; fax: +64 3 364 2907; e-mail: [email protected].

Endnotes1 Two main approaches have dominated development practice and research on women in the third world.

The Women in Development approach was largely about bringing women into processes of modernis-ation and making them visible in the development process. It took women’s issues into account but underestimated the structural inequalities between women and men that hindered development. The Gender and Development approach to development theory and practice emerged as a result of critiques of the prevailing WID paradigm. GAD analyses insist that the power relations between women and men need to be properly considered in the development process. They have increasingly become part of the development policies of national governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (see Moser, 1993; 1995; Rathgeber, 1990).

2 I do however welcome attempts to do so without losing sight of cultural and political specificity. For an example, see Enarson (2001, p. 15).

3 Sergio Sáenz, Communal Movement leader, personal communication, Matagalpa, September 1999.4 I acknowledge, following Rowlands (1997), that empowerment is a contested and difficult concept

and that it is not always clear to participants in development projects what it means and how we can know whether it has occurred. My understanding of empowerment in this context is based on the narratives of participants.

5 It was clear that the high levels of child malnutrition in El Mirador were related to broader socio-economic deprivation and did not come about because of the hurricane. Some of the children displayed degrees of physical and mental retardation as a result of having tolerated sustained periods of malnutrition.

6 Zoila Hernández, Communal Movement coordinator, personal communication, Matagalpa, Octo-ber 1999.

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7 Coffee is Matagalpa’s main export crop. In 2001, the price of coffee on the international market fell to below the cost of production putting hundreds of coffee workers out of work and bringing economic depression to the entire region.

8 It is possible that some of the challenges faced by the Communal Movement can be partially attributed to its political origins. The Communal Movement today is an autonomous neighbourhood lobbying organisation that evolved from the Sandinista Defence Committees, responsible for revolutionary vigi-lance. While the Communal Movement has successfully moved away from the Sandinista leadership and indeed has often expressed criticism of the leaders and provided aid and support to people regardless of political sympathies, it has struggled to shake off the vertical tendencies that were central to revolu-tionary political practice based on cadres. It is possible that this verticality, which at times seems to lend itself to paternalism, also contributed to aid dependency in El Mirador to some extent. Sergio Sáenz, Communal Movement leader, personal communication, Matagalpa, September 1999.

9 In 1999, there were 12 córdobas (C$) to the US dollar.10 Author interview with Marcia Picado, El Mirador, 4 November 1999.11 Author interview with Marcia Picado, El Mirador, 27 July 1999.12 Nicaragua, as a result of its revolutionary history and the Contra war of the 1980s, is a highly polarised

country in political terms. Attempts at reconciliation between Sandinistas and ex-Contras have been fraught with complexities (see Cupples, 2004b). In El Mirador after the hurricane, Sandinista supporters and ex-Contras both found themselves living in the same community.

13 Author interview with Marcia Picado, El Mirador, 27 July 1999.14 Author interview with Carolina Segovia, El Tambor, 22 October 1999.15 Author interview with Lydia Sánchez, Barrio Richardson, 23 October 1999.16 Author interview with Patricia Cedeño, Apantillo Siares, 12 November 1999.17 For a slightly different view of post-disaster empowerment possibilities through reconstruction work,

see Cupples, 2004a.18 A game played at children’s birthday parties in which a papier-mâché doll filled with sweets is broken

and everyone grabs what they can. 19 A local woman gave Orlando away as a baby. Ramona’s partner was violently opposed to the ‘adoption’,

insisting that Ramona did not need any more children and that this baby was likely to die anyway. When she took him in, he was in desperate need of medical attention as he had been badly beaten, his scalp was infected and he had ticks. After a period of hospitalisation, though, he recovered. Informal adoption is a widespread practice in Nicaragua. It is fairly common for children not to live with their biological parents and to be cared for or raised by other family members or in a non-family environment. According to a government survey, 15 per cent of Nicaraguan households have an ‘adopted’ child or a child who does not live with his or her biological parents even though they are alive (INEC, 1999).

20 Author interview with Ramona Dávila, El Mirador, 1 September 1999.21 Author interview with Ramona Dávila, El Mirador, 1 September 1999.22 The mujer sufrida, the archetypal self-sacrificing, hardworking, struggling and abused woman, is central

to the construction of dominant femininities in Latin America and often finds cultural expression in poems and television soap operas (telenovelas). As Johannson (1999) indicates in her study of the con-struction of femininity among low-income Nicaraguan women in León, it is a representation that is however marked by contradiction, multiplicity and flux, given that it is used to display self-assertion as well as notions of victimhood. For a discussion of the concept in the Mexican context, see Paz (1993). I am grateful to Guadalupe Rosales for the conversations we had about the mujer sufrida.

23 Author interview with Marcia Picado, El Mirador, 31 August 1999.24 Author interview with Marcia Picado, El Mirador, 31 August 1999.25 I became acutely aware during this research of how I was also perceived increasingly as a source of aid

and income by Marcia. I realised that at times, she would exaggerate her difficulties to me, stressing, for example, that she had no family support, even though I learned later that her sister would often look


after her children. The children also seemed to become ever more shrewd during my visits, particu-larly when their mother was absent. For instance, they showed me an empty can of baby milk in the hope that I would replace it, or told me that their mother had no shampoo or underwear and asked if we could go to the store so that I could buy some. Marcia herself would sometimes suggest that an item of jewellery or clothing of mine would make a nice parting gift to her. I never had this experience with Ramona whose financial difficulties were just as great as those of Marcia. That participants saw me as a potential source of income and gifts is not surprising given our relative inequalities and their financial situation, but it can be hugely difficult to negotiate.

26 Author interview with Elsa Jirón, El Tambor, 8 November 1999.27 Author interview with Elsa Jirón, El Tambor, 8 November 1999.

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Vargas, O. (1999) Nicaragua: después del Mitch …¿qué? Centre of Studies of the Reality of Nicaragua (CEREN), National Commission for the Prevention of Risks and Attention to Emergency (CNE) and Documen-tation Centre of Honduras (CEDOH), Managua.

WFP (World Food Programme of the United Nations) (1999) Protracted Relief and Recovery Program: Assist-ance for Reconstruction and Rehabilitation to Families in Central America Affected by Hurricane Mitch. Projects for Executive Board Approval. WFP, Rome.

Race, Gender & Class: Volume 14, Number 1-2, 2007 (60-68)

Race, Gender & Class Website: www.suno.edu/sunorgc/

NATURAL DISASTERS ANDGENDER INEQUALITIES: THE 2004 TSUNAMI AND

THE CASE OF INDIA

Revathi I. HinesPolitical Science

Southern University and A & M College

Abstract: This research examines the link between gender and natural disasters.Specifically, it studies the 2004 Tsunami, that occurred in the Indian Ocean, andthe inordinate impact it had on females in India. There are two fundamentalgender issues that are examined in this paper: (a) The reasons why more womenthan men were impacted by the 2004 tsunami, and (b) The post-tsunamichallenges that were faced by women. Through the research it is observed thatfollowing the tsunami, gender concerns were overlooked and social realitieswere ignored. As a result, women were marginalized in the process. Theabsence of any concrete gender analysis at the governmental level, indicates thenonchalant attitude toward gender concerns.

Keywords: tsunami; gender; India; natural disasters; disaster challenges; genderchallenges

Revathi I. Hines is an Associate Professor in the Nelson Mandela School ofPublic Policy and Urban Affairs. Her research interests include: gender studies,environmental justice issues, sustainability research, and minority issues.

Address: Department of political Science, Southern University and A & MCollege, P.O. Box 9656, Baton Rouge, LA 70813. Ph: (225) 771-3210, Fax:(225) 771-2848, Email: [email protected]

Natural Disaster and Gender Inequalities 61

Natural disasters do not discriminate. Major natural disasters havea profound economic and social effect on both men and women.However, the social norms and gender constructs that have

developed in societies lead to the discriminatory impact of natural disasters.Usually, women have the responsibility of taking care of the elderly, thechildren, providing for food, and running a home. As a result, after a naturaldisaster, women are the ones who bear an additional burden (ActionAidInternational, 2006).

The social and economic breakdown that follow natural disastersusually make women more vulnerable to sexual abuse and domestic violence.Women are usually put up in shelters that lack security and privacy, whichfurther threaten their survival after disasters. Most disaster relief efforts fail towrite policies that cater to the unique needs of females. Pregnant women maylack obstetrical care and young women may lack access to contraception orsanitary supplies. Often, supplies in relief programs are distributed by men, anddisplaced female victims feel uncomfortable attaining them from the males(Chew & Ramdas, 2005).

Literature indicates certain gendered impacts of natural disasters.Firstly, natural disasters greatly impacts women’s economic insecurities. Theyhave less access to resources. In most cases, women who lose their husbandshave to take on the unprepared responsibility of becoming the bread winner ofthe household. Gender stereotypes and social structures may limit heropportunities. Secondly, the immediate impact of natural disasters have led toan increase in women’s workload. They have to incorporate earning wagesalong with their socially required tasks such as caretakers, caregivers, andnurturers. Thirdly, women’s role in the society deteriorates even further, asresponsibilities and extended family conflicts increase (Infocus Programme onCrisis Response and Reconstruction, 2000).

Women recover very slowly from natural disasters than men do: (a)women are not as mobile as men; (b) they have limited opportunities because ofgendered division of labor; (c) women are not often the direct recipients offinancial assistance, as most assistance is usually given to the male head of thehousehold; and (d) the patriarchal society that women live in makes them moresocially and economically vulnerable than men (Infocus Programme on CrisisResponse and Reconstruction, 2000).

Inspite of all the literature, disaster management policies often ignorethe vulnerablity of women to such disasters. Disaster management policies areseldom designed with women in mind. Given the women’s marginal role in thesociety, they rarely play key roles in writing disaster management policies.

62 Natural Disaster and Gender InequalitiesRESEARCH OBJECTIVES

This research examines the concept of gender and natural disasters. Itdoes this by studying the impact that the 2004 tsunami had on the women inIndia. There are two fundamental gender issues that are examined in this paper:(a) The reasons why more women than men were impacted by the 2004 tsunami,and (b) The post-tsunami challenges that were faced by women. Further, thepaper also discusses what can be done in the future to better tailor disastermanagement policies to fit the agenda of women around the globe.

THE 2004 TSUNAM I AND INDIA

On December 26, 2004 a tsunami struck the coastlines of twelvecountries, in Asia and Africa, around the Indian Ocean. This tsunami wastriggered by an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale and haddeveloped near the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. The total death toll wasover 300,000. Globally, more than 1.6 million people were displaced (Jenkins,2005). In India, tidal waves as high as ten meters drenched the coastline up tothree kilometers inland. About 2,260 km of the coastal area besides theAndaman & Nicobar Islands were affected.

India was the third country severely impacted after Indonesia andSrilanka. Extensively damaged were the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu,Andaman and Nicobar islands, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry. The officialdeath toll of India was reported at 10,749 and another 6,000 were reportedmissing and feared to be dead. Approximately 154,000 homes were destroyedand 600,000 people were displaced and moved to emergency shelters. Theoverall financial loss of India has been estimated at about $ 2 billion U.S. dollars(Human Rights Watch, 2005).

The fishermen communities that lived in the coastline suffered the mostdamage and destruction. Approximately 80 percent of the dead on the mainlandwere from fishing communities. They lost their homes and their source oflivelihood. In the fishing communities of Tamil Nadu, 376 villages wereaffected; Andhra Pradesh, 301 villages were affected; Kerala 187 villages wereaffected; and Pondicherry, 33 villages were affected.

2004 Tsunami and Impact on Women

While these statistics emerged, there was another startling statistic thatbegan to surface and expose the gender inequalities natural disasters. Globally,three times more women than men were killed by the tsunami. This patternstood same for India. In Cuddalore 391 women and 146 men died. InPachaankuppam only women died. In Nagapattinam, 2,406 women and 1,883

Natural Disaster and Gender Inequalities 63men died. In Devanampattinam, 42 women and 21 men died. The highernumber of female deaths led to a shift in gender ratio, otherwise referred to as“gender breakdown” (Felten-Biermann, 2006).

This gender breakdown that revealed itself after the tsunami, thoughalarming, was not surprising. Those involved in gender studies and naturaldisasters had more often than not written and researched on the differentialimpact of natural disasters on women. Time after time, not only do a higherpercentage of women become victims of natural disasters, but they also sufferfrom the impacts of natural disasters at a unequal and alarming rate.

When one examines the reasons as to why more women than men diedas a result of the tsunami, several observations can be made. The reasons for thedifferential impact on women can be grouped into three broad categories: (1)Impact of Traditional Division of Labor; (2) Impact of Patriarchal Society; and(3) Impact of Gender Socializations.

Impact of Traditional Division of Labor: Gender dimensions are very important in understanding vulnerabilities

and impact. Women are usually the victims of the gendered division of labor.They have less access to resources and less mobility. Men usually do notundertake the task of fulfilling the role of primary care givers to the children andelderly in the family.

In the fishing communities, gender norms dictate the traditionaldivision of labor. Men traditionally owned boats and went out fishing, whilewomen waited for them to come home with the catch. On the day the tsunamihit, men were out fishing at sea. When the tsunami waves passed over thewaters, it was relatively calm. The fishermen did not suspect much. However,the women were waiting on the shores to receive the men. Oblivious to theimpending doom, the women waited and instantly became a large proportion ofthe tsunami victims. Many women in the fishing communities died this way(Oxfam International, 2005).

Other women who were not waiting at the shoreline for their men, wereinside their homes cooking or taking care of the children and/or elderly.Cooking and taking care of the elderly are classified as women’s work. Thesewomen had little awareness of the approaching disaster, leaving them with notime to plan an escape.

Impact of Patriarchal Society: Women are also more vulnerable to disasters due to the socially

constructed patriarchal traditions and expectations. Patriarchal restrictionsmanifest themselves by promoting the image of a woman being weak andphysically inept. Such traditions damage female empowerment and usuallycomes at a cost to women.

64 Natural Disaster and Gender InequalitiesPatriarchal traditions and taboos of the fishing community prevented

women from entering the sea. Not being able to enter the sea, meant notknowing how to swim for many females. Such a restriction proved to bedetrimental to the women who stayed shoreline waiting for their husbands and tothose who stayed inland taking care of their wifely duties. Many did not knowhow to swim and were not able to rescue themselves when the tsunami wavespounded the coastline (Oxfam International, 2005).

Impact of Gender Socializations: Gender socialization is a process through which males and females

develop beliefs and ideas about what a man or a woman can and cannot do. Thisprocess usually fosters and builds certain gender stereotypes that exist in variouscommunities. Females learn from a very early age what it is to be “lady-like”and males learn behaviors that are attributed as “manly.”

In the fishing communities these gender socializations, combined withpatriarchal taboos, have led to a strict division of labor and gender expectations.Women , in the fishing communities of India, were socialized to not climb trees.Climbing trees by women was equivalent to behaving “like a boy.” When thetsunami waves crashed into the coastline, many women could not save theirlives by climbing high off the ground. They simply lacked the skill andexpertise to do so (Oxfam International, 2005).

Post-tsunami Challenges Faced by Women

The challenges faced by women can be grouped into four broadcategories. They are: Camp challenges, Societal challenges, Health challenges,and Economic challenges.

Camp Challenges: Temporary shelter and camps created many challenges for women.

Women lacked adequate bathing and toilet facilities. The existing facilitiesmostly lacked privacy or were located in remote areas. Most shelters werepartitioned by either broken partitions or flimsy cloth, thereby encroaching onwomen’s privacy. Women in camps complained that they did not have adequatetoilet facilities and that they had to walk very long distances to use thesefacilities (Daily Telegraph, 2005).

The lack of privacy resulted in problems such as rape, violence, andabuse on camp sites. Sexual violence grew as toilet facilities were located out inthe public domain. Some camps were held very close to main streets. The lackof privacy and adequate protection led to outsiders and other males within thecamps to abuse the women who lived there. Women and children lived withinthe male-dominated camp sites in tears.

In some areas in Tamil Nadu structures were constructed with tar

Natural Disaster and Gender Inequalities 65sheeting which made the rooms unbearably hot to sleep in. Women had tochoose between sleeping inside the rooms and become overheated or sleepingoutside the room and become a victim of abuse. Many preferred risking abusethan heat exhaustion. (Action Aid International, 2006).

Women living in camps were also victims of the patriarchal society inwhich it is a taboo for a woman to go to a male doctor. A lack of gendersensitivity in planning led to an overall ignorance of a woman’s needs. Many ofthe doctors in the temporary shelters were males. Women in temporary housingusually opted not to see a male doctor. This decision was much stronger when itpertained to women’s obstetrical or gynecological needs. The decision wasdetrimental to pregnant women and lactating mothers who risked their healthand the health of their unborn children (The Statesman, 2005).

Societal Challenges: The women who survived the tsunami underwent serious family

structural changes. Single women started assuming never before assumedfamily leadership roles. Single parenting in a patriarchal society presented itselfwith many other challenges. After the tsunami, many women became first timeboat owners. This was traditionally a male occupation. It was challenging forwomen to make such a transition despite disapproval from societal norms.Crossing over patriarchal restrictions and gender taboos were very challengingfor the women who dared to do so.

After the tsunami, the burden of providing the family with water stillfell on women. Damaged infrastructure combined with the scarcity of waterresources forced many women to walk miles away from home. Accounts havebeen obtained of women leaving their homes at 4:00 a.m. in search of water(ActionAid International, 2006).

Also, in many villages, young girls whose parents or fathers had died,were being forced into early marriages. They were being married off withintheir extended families or to lenders as a means to pay off family debts.Domestic abuse and violence also became growing family problems. Many menand women had taken to alcohol as a stress reliever. Women faced abuse frommale counterparts of the family who were drunk. Many women who lost theirhusbands became overburdened and had to take care of domestic work, childcare, and earn a living. The status of women became weaker and so did theirability to negotiate within and outside the family (Philip, 2005).

Health Challenges: Disaster relief programs usually do not pay attention to specific

women’s health needs. Displaced women usually lack access to doctors,contraception, undergarments, or even sanitary supplies. Health relief efforts areusually tailored around surgical equipments, food, and supplies. Often, criticalissues arising from mental health such as depression, stress, post-traumatic

66 Natural Disaster and Gender Inequalitiesdisorder, and the like are often overlooked.

After the 2004 tsunami, many women suffered from depression andpost-traumatic stress. However, there was a lack of physco-social care orsupport group. For many affected women, their kin group and neighbors, onwhom they had depended on for support, were either spread out in the variousshelter camps or were dead. For the most part, women had to teach themselvescoping strategies. Sometimes they go together in the camps to talk and supportone another. Statistics indicated that 37.5 percent of women took up drinking inorder to cope with stress. Stress combined with issues such as abuse, rape, earlymarriages, and a total lack of mental help weakened the status of women in thesecommunities. Some women also opted to suicide as a way to end their life’smisery (Oxfam International, 2005).

Many women who had lost their children to the deadly disaster werebeing abused and harassed by their husbands and/or household members. Menand their families began forcing their wives to have more kids. Husbandsthreatened to leave their wives and re-marry another if the wives refused to orcould not have children. As a result, many of the surviving married womenwere forced to reverse their sterilization operations and bear children, sometimesrisking themselves and sometimes the potential foetus and child. (ActionAidInternational, 2005).

Economic Challenges: Many women, especially widows and destitutes had been left out of the

relief programs because the fishing societies had been dominated by men. It wasvery challenging for women to prove themselves as the heads of theirhouseholds. Relief funds were almost always only handed out to male relativesand/or members of the household.

Money went to the male of the household. Widows had to provide thenames of male relatives to whose names the checks were made out. Manywidows never saw the money. Women from the fishing villages also had to faceunfair decisions from village councils on which men sat and decided on reliefand rehabilitation issues (ActionAid International, 2006).

In the fishing community, the fisherwomen did not own boats.However, their contribution to the labor market came in form of performingtasks such as cleaning, drying, and selling the fish catch. After the tsunami,relief programs were set to provide for funding to boat owners who had lost theirboats to the tsunami. However, women who were widowed by the tsunami werenot given retribution, since they did not own the boats themselves (OxfamInternational, 2005).

The relief programs did not take into consideration that the death oftheir husbands caused these women to face a domino-effect of economic

Natural Disaster and Gender Inequalities 67burdens. Economic challenges still continue. Two years after the tsunami,women are selling their kidneys for survival. The need for money is so urgentand immediate that women are sacrificing long term health issues for short termfinancial gains.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FOR FUTURE DISASTER MANAGEM ENT POLICIES

Economic loss combined with a loss of social stature had led to anerosion in the women’s ability to negotiate within and outside the family. Theloss of homes, family members, and source of income and living led to increasedgender inequality. Family structures had also gone through great changes afterthe tsunami. In some cases, nuclear families have been replaced by single parenthouses wherein women have had to learn very quickly on how to run a familyand perform new roles (Oxfam briefing). Moreover, household and familyresponsibilities of women have made them less mobile than men. Women arenot as able to migrate outside the impacted area of earn money (Geneva).

It is obvious that following the tsunami, gender concerns wereoverlooked and social realities were ignored. As a result, women weremarginalized in the process. The absence of any concrete gender analysis at thegovernmental level, indicates the nonchalant attitude toward gender concerns.As observed through the case study, this neglect has led to a domino effect ofissues. Post disaster women are at an increased risk of violence; they do notreceive the necessary health care; they may be denied relief aid or compensation;they are excluded from rebuilding efforts, and therefore continue ongoingvulnerability.

Women have been left out of the decision-making process; allocation offunds; and design of shelters. Their right to participate equally in the decision-making process has been ignored. The human rights of women have beenneglected.

Some lessons that can be learned from the above case study are asfollows:! Include women in pre-disaster and post-disaster management! Include women’s participation at all levels of disaster management of

decision-making process! Design shelters with women’s physical and mental needs in mind! Ensure equal and fair aid and relief distribution! Make protecting women from sexual violence and abuse a priority ofdisaster management! Design a gender-specific policy by collecting and using sex-aggregateddata and information

68 Natural Disaster and Gender InequalitiesA narrow view of disaster management leads to a ready-made program

that is not tailored to the social realities and gender concerns of a society. Theopportunity to change the traditional gender inequalities during a disaster iswasted if gender sensitivity is not incorporated into it.

REFERENCES

ActionAid International. (2006). Tsunami response: A human rightsassessment report. Johannesburg: South AfricaDaily Telegraph. (2004, March 28). Women bear brunt of a wave of tragic

circumstances. Daily Telegraph, 19. Felten-Biermann, C. (2006). Gender and natural disaster: Sexualized violence

and the Tsunami. Development, 49:82-86. Human Rights Watch. (2005). After the deluge: India’s reconstructionfollowing the 2004 Tsunami: Meenakshi Ganguly. Infocus Programme on Crisis Response and Reconstruction, Recovery and

Reconstruction Department. (2000). Gender and natural disasters.Geneva: Elaine Emerson.

Jenkins, M. (2005, March 24). Women vastly outnumber men as Tsunamivictims, Oxfam says. AAP Newsfeed

Lin, C. & Ramdas, K.N. (2005). Caught in the storm: The impact of naturaldisasters on women. The Global Fund for Women, December 2005. Oxfam International. (2005, March). The Tsunami’s impact on women Oxfam

Briefing Note. Phillip, C. (2005, June 06). Tsunami’s teenage brides take place of the lost

women. Times Online. The Statesman. (2005, March 28). Tsunami created gender imbalance. TheStatesman.

The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: TheImpact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in

Life Expectancy, 1981–2002Eric Neumayer* and Thomas Plumperw

*London School of Economics and Political SciencewUniversity of Essex and Max-Planck Institute of Economics

Natural disasters do not affect people equally. In fact, a vulnerability approach to disasters would suggest thatinequalities in exposure and sensitivity to risk as well as inequalities in access to resources, capabilities, andopportunities systematically disadvantage certain groups of people, rendering them more vulnerable to the im-pact of natural disasters. In this article we address the specific vulnerability of girls and women with respect tomortality from natural disasters and their aftermath. Biological and physiological differences between the sexesare unlikely to explain large-scale gender differences in mortality rates. Social norms and role behaviors providesome further explanation, but what is likely to matter most is the everyday socioeconomic status of women. In asample of up to 141 countries over the period 1981 to 2002 we analyze the effect of disaster strength and itsinteraction with the socioeconomic status of women on the change in the gender gap in life expectancy. We find,first, that natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. In other words, naturaldisasters (and their subsequent impact) on average kill more women than men or kill women at an earlier agethan men. Since female life expectancy is generally higher than that of males, for most countries natural disastersnarrow the gender gap in life expectancy. Second, the stronger the disaster (as approximated by the number ofpeople killed relative to population size), the stronger this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. That is,major calamities lead to more severe impacts on female life expectancy (relative to that of males) than do smallerdisasters. Third, the higher women’s socioeconomic status, the weaker is this effect on the gender gap in lifeexpectancy. Taken together our results show that it is the socially constructed gender-specific vulnerability offemales built into everyday socioeconomic patterns that lead to the relatively higher female disaster mortalityrates compared to men. Key Words: gender, mortality, natural disaster, socioeconomic status, vulnerability.

The human impact of natural disasters is neverentirely determined by nature, but is contingenton economic, cultural, and social relations. In

this article we address one important, yet hitherto rela-tively neglected aspect of disasters (WHO 2002),namely the gendered nature of disaster vulnerability asrevealed by gender-specific disaster mortality. Anderson(2000, 86), in a World Bank publication on managingdisaster risk, is adamant that ‘‘much more research isneeded to fully understand the extent to which genderplays a role in differential casualty rates.’’ This article’sanalysis provides an important step in that direction.Specifically, we analyze the impact of natural disasters onthe gender gap in life expectancy, which is the differencebetween female and male life expectancy at birth (inmost countries women live longer than men).

Our study takes seriously gender as an analyticalcategory. We explain the differential impact of naturaldisasters on female relative to male life expectancy notmerely by recourse to different physical exposures andbiological or physiological gender differences, but also by

the different socially constructed vulnerabilities thatderive from the social roles men and women assume,voluntarily or involuntarily, as well as existing patterns ofgender discrimination. Our study adopts a vulnerabilityapproach to natural disasters as an analytical concept.Many disaster scholars subscribe to such an approachand have made significant contributions to its develop-ment (see, e.g., O’Keefe, Westgate, and Wisner 1976;Cuny 1983; Hewitt 1983; Cannon 1994, 2000; Varley1994; Wisner et al. 1994, 2004; Cutter 1996; Fordham2004). As Cutter (1996, 530) has pointed out, vulner-ability ‘‘still means different things to different people.’’We adopt the definition of vulnerability given in Wisneret al. (2004), in which an explanation of ‘‘the risks in-volved in disasters must be connected with the vulner-ability created for many people through their normalexistence,’’ and where vulnerability is defined as ‘‘thecharacteristics of a person or group and their situationinfluencing their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resistand recover from the impact of a natural hazard’’ (Wi-sner et al. 2004, 4, 11).1 It follows that the impacts of

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(3), 2007, pp. 551–566 r 2007 by Association of American GeographersInitial submission, January 2006; revised submissions, August and November 2006; final acceptance, January 2007

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.

natural disasters are never merely determined by natureon its own. Indeed, it becomes even questionablewhether one can talk of ‘‘natural’’ disasters at all. Can-non (1994, 14) argues that ‘‘there are no generalizedopportunities and risks in nature, but instead there aresets of unequal access to opportunities and unequal exposuresto risks which are a consequence of the socio-economicsystem’’ (emphasis in the original). In other words, vul-nerability, as used in this article, captures the differentialexposure to risks and capacity to cope with risks sys-tematically attributed to people across space and time,which, together with other attributes such as ethnicity orclass, are often functions of an individual’s gender, thefocus of analysis here (see Cannon 1994; Wisner et al.2004).

There is renewed interest in studying the social im-pacts of natural disasters across the social sciences. Forexample, economists have recently studied how acountry’s low level of economic development, poorquality of governance institutions, and high degree ofinequality increase the death toll from earthquakes(Anbarci, Escaleras, and Register 2005) as well as fromother types of natural disasters (Kahn 2005). Geogra-phers, sociologists, and other social scientists have ad-dressed the vulnerability of certain groups of people tonatural disasters (see, among others, Cannon 1994,2000; Wisner et al. 1994, 2004; Cutter 1996; Mustafa2002 and references cited therein). Increasingly, evenphysical geographers and public health scholars ac-knowledge that a better mitigation of negative disasterimpacts is contingent on a better understanding of thesocially constructed vulnerabilities of specific groups ofaffected people (Noji 1997b; Alcantara-Ayala 2002;Degg and Chester 2005a, 2005b). Within the broaderfield of disaster and environmental change research, anemergent literature addresses the specific vulnerability ofwomen (Cutter 1995; Bolin, Jackson, and Crist 1998;Enarson 1998, 2000; Enarson and Morrow 1998; Foth-ergill 1998; Fordham 2004; Bradshaw 2004; Enarson andMeyreles 2004).

Our original contribution is to provide the first sys-tematic, quantitative analysis of gender differences innatural disaster mortality. This is of course only one as-pect, but due to its far-reaching consequences (life ordeath) it is arguably the most important aspect of thegendered impact of natural disasters. Existing studieseither do not estimate gender-specific mortality ratesand patterns at all (Anbarci, Escaleras, and Register2005; Kahn 2005) or are confined to single events suchthat no general conclusions can be drawn (Bern et al.1993; Ikeda 1995; O’Hare 2001; Oxfam International2005). It is only by quantitative analysis of mortality

rates or summary mortality measures such as life ex-pectancy that we can discern whether the anecdotalevidence captures a general trend. We believe that ourcontribution buttresses Cutter’s (2003, 6) claim in herPresidential Address to the Association of AmericanGeographers that ‘‘geography has added a technologicalsophistication to hazards research that is unrivalledamong the social sciences’’ and that ‘‘the discipline israpidly becoming the driving force behind vulnerabilityscience’’.2 In linking spatial patterns of disaster risk tohuman-generated vulnerability, geography is uniquelypositioned to study the impact of natural disasters onsocioeconomic systems and groups of people. One of the‘‘most significant themes’’ listed by Cutter (2003, 7) isthe need ‘‘to identify, delineate, and understand thosedriving forces that increase or decrease vulnerability atall scales.’’ This study identifies one important drivingforce by demonstrating how low socioeconomic statusrenders women more vulnerable to the mortal impact ofnatural disasters.

In brief, we find that natural disasters affect womenmore adversely than men in terms of the effect of di-sasters on the life expectancy at birth. What this meansis that natural disasters on average kill more women thanmen or kill women at a younger age than men, and themore so the stronger the disaster. Yet the extent to whichwomen are more likely to die than men or to die at ayounger age from the immediate disaster impact or frompostdisaster events depends not only on disaster strengthitself but also on the socioeconomic status of women inthe affected country. The higher women’s status, thesmaller is the differential negative effect of natural di-sasters on female relative to male life expectancy. Whatthis means is that where the socioeconomic status ofwomen is high, men and women will die in roughly equalnumbers during and after natural disasters, whereaswhen the socioeconomic status of women is low, morewomen than men die (or women die at a younger age).These results corroborate a vulnerability approach tonatural disasters since the more adverse impact of di-sasters on female compared to male life expectancy isclearly contingent on the extent of socially constructedvulnerability and there is nothing natural in thegendered impact of disasters on life expectancy.3

This article is structured as follows: The next sectionpresents arguments and anecdotal evidence suggestingthat natural disasters increase female mortality morethan male mortality. Two hypotheses are developed fromthis discussion and are put to an empirical test. Thefollowing section then describes the sources of data andthe operationalization of the relevant variables for theeconometric estimation. A discussion of the appropriate

Neumayer and Plumper552

estimation technique is followed by a presentation ofresults. We conclude by arguing that our study’s findingssupport a vulnerability approach to natural disasters.

Natural Disasters and the Gender Gap inLife Expectancy

Human beings can and in fact do influence—willinglyand unwillingly—the degree to which natural disastersharm people, reduce their welfare, and cost their lives.This section deals with the interaction between naturaldisasters and societies. For a whole range of reasons,mortality vulnerability to natural hazards is likely to begender-specific, with women bearing the major burden.

From a conceptual perspective, it seems most fruitfulto distinguish between three main causes for genderdifferences in mortality vulnerability to natural disasters:First, biological and physiological differences betweenmen and women may at times disadvantage women intheir immediate response to the disaster. Second, socialnorms and role behavior may lead to a behavior ofwomen that increases their vulnerability in the imme-diate course of the disaster. And third, disasters may leadto shortage of resources of basic need as well as a tem-porary breakdown of social order, in which case thecompetition between individuals becomes fiercer andexisting forms of gender discrimination become exacer-bated and new forms of discrimination can emerge. Withthe exception of the biological and physiological reasons,the higher vulnerability of women is socially constructedand is due to differences in the socioeconomic status ofmen and women. In the following subsections, we dis-cuss the three main causes in turn. Certainly thesecauses are not independent and may easily reinforceeach other, however for explanatory purposes we discussthem separately and in turn.

Biological and Physiological Differences

Biological and physiological differences in disasterresponse capacity can lead to differential mortality ratesfor three main reasons. First, men can be physiologicallybetter equipped to withstand a disaster’s physical impact.For instance, if a woman is less strong than male coun-terparts, she will be more easily swept away by wind orwater. This disadvantage is especially severe for womenin the final stages of pregnancy, who are less able to self-rescue because of their decreased mobility. On average,women can run less quickly and climb posts, trees, andother rescue points with greater difficulty and lowerspeed. However, as an Oxfam International (2005) re-

port on the December 2004 tsunami’s impact on womenin South and Southeast Asia demonstrates, differencesin self-rescue ability are partly determined by learnedskills and therefore not simply to the result of physio-logical differences: In affected regions of Sri Lanka,swimming and tree climbing are taught predominantly toboys and men as tasks ‘‘that are done nearly exclusivelyby men’’ (Oxfam International 2005, 9), which helpedmales to survive the waves. Ikeda’s (1995, 188) study ofgender differences in mortality from the 1991 Bangla-desh cyclone shows how physical disadvantages interactwith social norms and role behaviors that put women ata disadvantage in their self-rescue efforts. She points outthat one may ask why the body size of women is onaverage smaller and lighter4 (we discuss these issues inmore depths below). It is thus potentially misleadingwhen a group of public health scholars uncritically at-tribute higher female to male mortality from the sameevent ‘‘to factors such as physical size, strength, andendurance’’ (Bern et al. 1993, 75).

Second, men and women have different propensitiesto die from various diseases, but the implications forgender-specific disaster mortality are ambiguous. Withthe possible exception of measles, for which some evi-dence suggests that women might be more susceptible todeath (Garenne 1995), in general men are more prone toacquire and die from parasitic and infectious diseases(Owens 2002). Toole (1997a), in his review of the lit-erature, comes to the conclusion that communicabledisease epidemics are rare after most natural disasters,with the exception of droughts and famines. On thewhole, there is no reason to suspect that diseases relatedto natural disasters will systematically disadvantagewomen. Furthermore, in principle, women are at anadvantage in famines and droughts because, unless theyare pregnant or lactating, they can better cope with foodshortages due to their lower nutritional requirementsand higher body fat (Rivers 1982). This can explain inpart why overall mortality rates for females are oftenlower in many famines, particularly the very severe onesof the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thanthey are for men (Macintyre 2002).5 Nevertheless, insome famines more female than male famine victims dieat a very young age or as infants, an outcome that mustbe due to discriminatory access to food resources in timesof famine with a bias against female babies and children;see Mariam (1986, 57) for the Ethiopian famine of theearly 1970s, Kidane (1989, 1990) for the Ethiopianfamine of 1984/85, Greenough (1982) and Agarwal(1990, 225ff) for the Bengal famine of 1943/1944, andDyson (1991a, 1991b) for South Asian famines moregenerally.6 There are no reliable statistics on the great

Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981–2002 553

Chinese famine of the early 1960s, but the account givenby a surviving Chinese peasant woman is revealing:‘‘Families tried to pool their rations and often the hus-band would rule that any female children should be al-lowed to die first’’ (Becker 1996, 3).

Third, large-scale natural disasters can have severedetrimental effects on the social infrastructures ofaffected countries, reducing access to food, hygiene,health services, and clean water (Noji 1997b). When thebasic health care infrastructure is severely damaged orhealth expenditures are reduced to reallocate publicfunds for immediate disaster response purposes, obstet-rical care is reduced, the number of miscarriages in-creases, as does maternal and infant mortality.

Social Norms and Role Behaviors

The discussion above would suggest that biologicallyor physiologically determined sex differences in disastermortality exist, but that their impact is likely to beweaker than it appears at first sight. Social norms androle behaviors might also provide reasons for gendereddisaster vulnerability in putting women at a clear dis-advantage when it comes to rescue attempts. We stressthat even if women follow these social norms and rolebehaviors seemingly voluntarily, the norms and rolesoften derive from the unequal distribution of powerbetween men and women in many societies.

In many countries women’s roles are to look after andprotect children and the elderly as well as the family’sdomestic property, which hampers their self-rescue ef-forts in almost any type of natural disaster (Beinin 1981;Schwoebel and Menon 2004; Oxfam International2005). Dress codes can restrict women’s ability to movequickly, and behavioral restrictions can hinder theirability to relocate without the the consent of husband,father, or brother. For example, in rural Bangladeshwomen are expected to wear a sari, traditional clothingthat hampers running and swimming, and to remain inthe bari, typically the houses of the family and near kin.These strictures can impede their movements and theiraccess to information about cyclone-induced floods(Ikeda 1995). Moreover, a social prejudice againstwomen learning to swim drastically reduces their sur-vival chances in flooding (Cannon 2000, 52).

Often, a traditional division of labor can disadvantagewomen in the event of certain natural disasters. Oxfam(2005) reports when the tsunami hit the coast of Indo-nesia many women in the rural coastal areas were athome, whereas the men were out at sea fishing or oth-erwise away from home. In India many women werewaiting at the seashore for the fishermen to arrive. In

both cases, many more men were spared because thewaves only gather height and strength as they approachshore and have their most fatal impact directly at thecoast. Similarly, during earthquakes the men are morelikely to be out in the open or in more robustly builtfactories and public buildings while the women are athome in dwellings more easily struck down by earth-quakes. Clearly this type of natural disaster is likely toaffect women more adversely, given that inadequatebuilding structures are by far the main cause of earth-quake fatalities (Noji 1997a). Even when men are athome, they are not necessarily equally as affected aswomen. In earthquakes in India men reportedly survivebetter even those events that hit at night because duringwarm nights men sleep outside and on rooftops, a be-havior impossible for most women who became trappedin their domestic homes (Krishnaraj 1997).

Yet, as with biological and physiological causes fordifferential mortality rates, a caveat is in place here aswell since differences in social roles and behaviors neednot always affect women more adversely. The effectreally depends on the type of natural disaster. In par-ticular, some evidence suggests that more men thanwomen die directly from severe weather events in theUnited States such as lightning, thunderstorms, andflash floods (Fothergill 1998). The same is reportedlytrue for immediate mortality from Hurricane Mitch inCentral America in 1998 (Bradshaw 2004, 25). A likelyreason is that on average more men are engaged inoutdoor work and leisure activities during such eventsand are more reckless in their behavior toward risk. It isdifficult to say whether such findings generalize to othersocieties, but the point remains valid that social normsand role behaviors often put women at greater risk ofdisaster mortality, depending on the type of disaster andits context. At times, social norms and role behavior caninstead put men at greater risk.

Discrimination in Access to Resources and theBreakdown of Social Order

We have seen so far that biological and physiologicaldifferences as well as social norms and role behaviors candisadvantage women in the event of natural disasters.Yet, we have also seen that the evidence is ambiguous onwhether these differences will affect women more ad-versely to a large extent.

In this subsection, we argue that while the genderdifferences in casualty rates result only partly and po-tentially in small part from the immediate effects of di-sasters (e.g., from collapsing buildings in earthquakes orflooded cities and villages), women are much more likely


than men to die after the disaster happened. Those in-direct effects can be explained by discrimination in ac-cess to resources and the temporary breakdown of socialorder. In societies with existing patterns of gender dis-crimination, males are likely to be given preferentialtreatment in rescue efforts. A telling example is given bya father who, unable to hold on to both his son and hisdaughter from being swept away by a tidal surge in the1991 Cyclone in Bangladesh, released his daughter be-cause ‘‘(this) son has to carry on the family line’’ (quotedin Haider, Rahman, and Huq 1993, 64). Men are alsolikely to access and allocate the assistance given toaffected families. Even in the absence of natural disas-ters, Sen (1988, 454) found that ‘‘there is a good deal ofevidence from all over the world that food is often dis-tributed very unequally within the family—with a dis-tinct sex bias (against the female) and also an age bias(against the children).’’ Bairagi (1986) reported that inrural Bangladesh the female children were more ad-versely affected by famine than were the boys. Whennatural disaster strikes, these preexisting discriminatorypractices become exacerbated and their detrimentalhealth impact on women and girls is intensified. Sen(1988, 459) has reported how women and girls weresystematically disadvantaged by food relief in the after-math of flooding in West Bengal that destroyed cropsand farmland. Enarson and Morrow (1998, 21) refer to arelief worker’s finding of discriminatory access to reliefsupplies in the aftermath of the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone(similar experiences are reported by Khondker 1996,288). Ager, Ager, and Long (1995) found in their studyof Mozambican refugees in Malawi in the late 1990s thatrelief policies were biased in favor of refugee men. A factsheet by the Pan-American Health Organization (2002)would suggest that this anecdotal evidence from a fewnatural disasters might be representative of a moregeneral trend, also suggesting unequal power structuresas the underlying cause: ‘‘The majority of relief effortsare intended for the entire population of a disaster-affected area; however, when they rely on existingstructures of resource distribution that reflects the pa-triarchal structure of society, women are marginalized intheir access to relief resources.’’

Natural disasters, if sufficiently strong, can also haveboth short-term and long-term negative effects on theaffected economies (Benson and Clay 2000, 2003;Freeman 2000; Hines and Jaramillo 2005). Some ofthese detrimental effects are compensated for by in-creased migrants’ remittances, foreign lending, aid, andinvestment, but it takes time until they do so (Yang2005). Women are likely to be adversely affected bydamage to economic livelihoods because basic survival

strategies such as securing water, food, and wood forheating purposes often fall on women, representing anextra burden on top of caring for and nurturing thefamily (Enarson 2000). Where natural disasters reducethe purchasing power of households, women can bemore adversely affected because in many countries menreceive preferential access to resources. When resourcesbecome scarcer, then the part of the population sufferingfrom discrimination beforehand will necessarily be hiteven harder (for a study of gender-conflicts in access towater and its uses in Bangladesh, see Crow and Sultana2002). In principle, recovery assistance could be prefer-entially addressed at those groups most vulnerable toprotect them from the negative effect of increased dis-crimination. Yet, as mentioned above, instead of beinggranted a preferential role, women are often marginali-zed in their access to relief resources (Pan-AmericanHealth Organization 2002). Many disaster researchershave noted that in most countries relief efforts are al-most exclusively managed and controlled by men, sys-tematically excluding women, their needs, competences,and experiences from contributing to these efforts (see,e.g., Enarson 2000; Bradshaw 2004).7

There is widespread agreement that the poor are moreadversely hit by the impact of natural disasters than arethose more well-off.8 The poor are less likely to be able toafford housing that can withstand seismic activity, theyoften live in flood- and storm-prone areas as well as onunstable slopes vulnerable to landslides, and they haveless access to education and financial resources toovercome adverse impacts (Noji 1997b, 12). Althoughsome have questioned the full extent to which existingevidence backs up the claim of a strong gender bias inpoverty (Chant 2006), there is general agreement thatpoor people on average are more likely to be female. Incombination, this implies that women will be more ad-versely affected by natural disasters since they are morethan proportionally represented among the poor. Forinstance, O’Hare (2001) found that the most vulnerablegroup affected by Hurricane 07B in the Godavari Deltain India was ‘‘migrant, scheduled (low) caste women’’who formed the major part of the landless agriculturallaborers. The vulnerability resulting from predominantlyfemale poverty is not confined to developing countries,however. For example, UNEP (2004) cites a study by theJapanese government that showed that during the Kobeearthquake in 1995 1.5 times as many women as mendied. In Kobe, many elderly single women died becausethey lived in poor residential areas, which were moreheavily damaged and more likely to catch fire.9

Lastly, there is some evidence, if not fully conclusive,that domestic and sexual violence against women in-


creases due to disaster-induced stress, alcohol abuse, andthe (temporary) breakdown of law and order (Bradshaw2004). If police, military, and fire brigades are unable (orunwilling) to organize the most severely affected regions,then distributive conflicts, theft, and open violence arelikely to emerge. A collapse of social order may be morelikely in countries in which the political authority isweak. However, the post-Katrina riots in New Orleanshave demonstrated that even superpowers are not safefrom disaster-related social unrest.

What is relatively well documented is that law andorder are difficult to sustain when victims of naturaldisasters have to seek refuge in makeshift refugee campsoften far away from their home cities or villages (Phuong2004). In overcrowded camps anarchy rules, leavingunaccompanied women and girls particularly vulnerableto sexual abuse and rape. In addition, as pointed outabove, women and girls are also more negatively affectedby the often appalling health and hygienic conditions inrefugee camps. This situation can become exacerbated ifculturally binding norms allow certain forms of femalehygienic care only under conditions of privacy and sepa-ration from men, which are often impossible to maintainin refugee camps. Toole (1997b) reports mortality ratesfrom several refugee camps that are up to 100 timeshigher than the normal mortality rate in the country. Datadisaggregated according to gender is very rare, but Toolereports data from a Burmese refugee camp in Bangladeshwhere female infants were twice as likely to die than maleinfants and the mortality rates of females above the age offive was 3.5 times higher than that of males.

Hypotheses

Biological and physiological differences between menand women, social norms and roles, which differentlyrestrict the behaviors of men and women, emergent re-source shortages and the temporary breakdown of socialorder jointly suggest that more women and girls thanmen and boys die during and after natural disasters or dieat a younger age. Yet, the theoretical considerations ofthe previous sections also suggest that this effect isconditional on the socioeconomic status of women andon gender relations in the society affected by the disaster.Therefore, we postulate two hypotheses concerning theimpact of natural disasters on the gender gap in life ex-pectancy:

Hypothesis 1: Natural disasters reduce the life ex-pectancy of women more than that ofmen and the effect is increasing in di-saster strength.

This is partly because only larger disasters will killenough people overall to leave their mark on our lifeexpectancy measures but, more important, also becauseonly larger disasters lead to the breakdown of infra-structure and law and order and to the drastically in-tensified competition for food and other scarceresources, leaving women in societies with rampantdiscrimination against females more vulnerable to di-saster-induced mortality.

Hypothesis 2: Natural disasters reduce the life ex-pectancy of women relative to that ofmen the more the lower is the socio-economic status of women.

We expect that women are more adversely affected bynatural disasters where female discrimination is morewidespread before the onset of natural disaster events.Where there is a pro-male bias in ‘‘normal’’ periods, suchbias becomes reinforced and exacerbated in postdisasterperiods (Dreze and Sen 1989, 55; Bolin, Jackson, andCrist 1998, 42). Women are more adversely affected bynatural disasters if gender inequalities in access to in-formation and economic resources and inequalities inpersonal freedom of choice before, during, and after di-sasters create a ‘‘gendered disaster vulnerability’’ (Enar-son 1998).

Research Design

Following on from the formulation of testable hy-potheses in the preceding section, here we discuss howwe measure and operationalize the three main conceptsof our analysis.

Measuring Disaster Strength

For most countries in the world, natural disasters are arelatively common event. Our source, the EmergencyDisasters Data Base (EM-DAT), collected at the Uni-versity of Louvain, Brussels, currently includes around9,700 natural disasters from 1900 to the present. Due tolimited data availability on our measure of women’ssocioeconomic status, our sample is restricted to theperiod 1981–2002. The sample still covers 4,605 naturaldisasters since the coverage of natural disasters in EM-DAT is not very comprehensive for the first few decadesof the twentieth century. EM-DAT is the only globaldata set of natural disasters that is publicly available. Twoother global data sets are maintained by private re-insurance companies (Swiss Re and Munich Re), but nopublic access is granted (Guha-Sapir and Below 2002).


To be recorded in the database, an event must fulfillat least one of the following conditions: (a) ten or morepeople reported as killed; (b) 100 people reported asaffected; (c) a state of emergency has been declared; or(d) the country has issued a call for international assis-tance. Clearly, with the latter two criteria the inclusionof an event in the database is partially endogenous to theresponse of governmental authorities in affected regions,states, or countries. Platt (1999) shows for the UnitedStates how the political struggle over who pays howmuch for the costs of natural disasters influences thelikelihood of an event being declared a ‘‘major disaster.’’It is probable that political considerations in othercountries as well affect the likelihood of declaration of astate of emergency or, depending on the circumstances, acall for international assistance. We see no reason whythis should bias our results since such political consid-erations are unlikely to be systematically correlated withour variables of interest. Nevertheless, we will show thatour results uphold if we restrict the sample to observa-tions with ten or more people killed.

Most disasters take place in large countries, with theUnited States (442) leading the list, followed by India(293) and China (125). On the bottom end of thenumber of disasters, we of course find microstates butalso Finland (1), Turkmenistan (2), and Sweden (4). Inabsolute numbers, the most victims were in Ethiopia(311,286), Sudan (158,252), and Bangladesh (149,225);the respective figure for the United States is 8,001 di-saster victims. Accordingly, we find relatively poorcountries suffering dramatically more from disasters interms of people killed than relatively rich countries.Drought- and famine-ridden countries lead in thenumber of victims per disaster (Ethiopia 5 4,716,Sudan 5 3,297, Mozambique 5 2,374), whereas onlyabout 18 people die from the average disaster in theUnited States.

The number of deaths per disaster offers a poor de-scription of the nature of our data. Most natural disasterscost few if any lives, but the three most severe disas-ters—the droughts in Ethiopia and Sudan in 1984 andthe flood in Bangladesh in 1991—account for almosthalf of all fatalities in our sample. In other words, severedisasters are rare events. As a consequence, the distri-bution of the disaster strength variable is extremelyskewed. It follows that we need to carefully check thevalidity of our results with regard to the leverage thatcertain influential observations might have on the results(see our bootstrap estimations below).

In operationalizing the EM-DAT data we have madethree important choices: First, for the purpose of thisstudy we decided not to focus on a specific disaster type

but to consider all types for which EM-DAT providesinformation together. Our measure of natural disastersincludes droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, extremetemperatures, famines, fires, floods, insect infestations,landslides, volcano eruptions, waves/surges, and wind-storms. Table 1 provides some summary statistics on eachdisaster type. We recognize that famines in particular areoften triggered by both natural factors and human de-cisions, but like Dreze and Sen (1989) we believe thatthese events cannot be neatly separated into ‘‘human-made’’ and ‘‘nature-made’’ types. We exclude disasterstriggered by technological hazards such as the large-scaleindustrial accidents of Bhopal or Chernobyl since theyare clearly human-made. Our decision to address allnatural disasters together makes it impossible to detectdifferences between the effects of various disaster typeson the gender gap in life expectancy, but we believe thatthis is inevitable for essentially two reasons: (1) thevariance of some subcategories of natural disasters is toolow to allow sufficiently efficient estimation, and (2) theEM-DAT unique categorization of each natural disasterinto a specific disaster type is open to contestation. Anatural disaster is thus, for example, a drought or afamine or a flood even though in the actual event mostpeople might die from epidemics.

Second, since our theoretical considerations suggestthat the impact on the gender gap in life expectancyincreases with the magnitude of the disaster, we cannotsimply use dummy variables for disaster events, but in-stead we need a measure of disaster strength. We con-sider the number of people killed as the most importantinformation of the magnitude of a disaster (rather than,for example, the number of people affected). We believethat the number of people killed is a better proxy ofdisaster strength because it is by far less arbitrary than

Table 1. Summary statistics on natural disasters in sample

Disaster typeTotal no.of events

Total no.of deaths

Total no.of people affected

Drought 240 556,687 1,388,252,544Earthquake 350 107,050 52,661,238Epidemic 317 105,678 13,346,403Extreme temp 108 16,897 6,120,497Famine 36 11,524 57,332,711Flood 938 119,707 1,731,081,382Insect infestations 42 0 2,200Landslide 182 14,228 1,122,215Volcano 48 25,053 2,501,368Waves/surges 12 2,724 12,919Wildfire 103 624 3,523,398Windstorm 1,121 87,029 340,100,574


the accounts of the number of people affected. EM-DATdefines the category of affected people as all those re-quiring immediate assistance. But the number of affectedpeople, thus defined, is much more difficult to estimate,and estimates from different sources vary far more thando estimates of the number of people killed. Guha-Sapirand Below (2002) provide some evidence of that in theircomparative analysis of the way disasters in four disaster-prone countries are recorded in EM-DAT and the datasets maintained by Munich Re and Swiss Re. They foundthat estimates of the number of people killed for thesame disasters were fairly close across the three data sets,whereas estimates of the number of people affectedvaried widely and sometimes by orders of magnitude.Quarantelli (2001, 326) in his critique of disaster statis-tics also points out that ‘‘figures on deaths are certainlythe most reliable.’’ We do agree, however, with his verdictthat even estimates of fatality figures are often subject touncertainties and sometimes to deliberate distortions,possibly on average tending to overestimate true casualtyfigures (Quarantelli 2001, 329). The number of killedpersons as our disaster strength variable is therefore aproxy rather than an exact measure of the severity ofdisaster, and there is likely to be measurement error inthe variable. However, as long as the error is not sys-tematically correlated with the gender gap in life expec-tancy, and we see no reason why this should be thecase, the measurement error will make our estimates lessefficient, but will not bias them.

Third, we divide the number of people killed by thetotal population of the country hit by the disaster. Theuse of per capita data is analytically warranted since theinfluence of natural disasters on an affected country’s lifeexpectancy not only depends on the magnitude of thedisaster but also on the population size of the affectedcountry. Everything else being equal, the smaller thepopulation size of the country under observation for di-sasters of a given size, the greater the reduction in lifeexpectancy. The same should hold true when we con-sider the gender gap in life expectancy rather thanlife expectancy itself. A disaster that has no influence onthe life expectancy can hardly affect the gender gap.10

Ideally, we would have life expectancy data for sub-national regions, so that we could easily estimate theimmediate and lingering consequences of a disaster onthe affected population. Unfortunately, this informationdoes not exist. The data we have allow analyzingonly the average life expectancy at the level of thenation-state. Hence, our disaster strength variable is thecumulated number of people killed by all natural disas-ters in a given year divided by the affected country’s totalpopulation.

The Gender Gap in Life Expectancy

To measure the size of the gender gap, we employ dataprovided by the International Data Base (IDB) of theU.S. Census Bureau, which to our knowledge is the mostreliable source for life expectancy data in panel form. Incomparison to data provided by the World Bank (2004),the IDP is much better maintained and has far fewermissing data. The IDP was created for scientific pur-poses, in response to the information requirements ofInternational Program Center (IPC) staff to meet theneeds of organizations that sponsor research efforts. TheIDB combines data from country sources (especiallycensuses and surveys) with IPC’s estimates and projec-tions, which are based on available census data andgroup cohort population projection techniques to com-pute data between the censuses. These projections arebased on country-specific fixed-slope logistic interpola-tions in the years between national censuses. Moreover,recent population and socioeconomic trends are takeninto account ‘‘if the projected trends are plausible’’ (U.S.Census 2004, B5). For instance, projection of fertilityutilizes trends in age at marriage, the percentage ofwomen using contraception, and existence and scope offamily-planning programs, and data on educational at-tainment are used in life expectancy calculations.11

The gender gap in life expectancy shows large varia-tions across time and space. Worldwide, on average,women’s life expectancy is 4.69 years higher than that ofmen. However, in 64 out of 2,266 country-years menactually lived longer than women. In Bangladesh, India,and Nepal this phenomenon is common and can possiblybe attributed to the traditional cultural bias against fe-males in these countries. In all other cases a higher malethan female life expectancy is the exception rather thanthe rule. On the other end of the spectrum, the gendergap is largest in post-transition Russia. The life expectancydifference between Russian women and men peaked in1994, reaching an extraordinary 13.74 years.12 It isnoteworthy that countries from the former Soviet Unionhold 49 of the top 50 country-years in terms of gendergap—the notable exception being Guatemala in 1981. Inall these cases, women lived to about 70 to 75 years whilemen on average died at the age of 60 or before.

We use as our dependent variable the ratio rather thanthe absolute difference in years of female to male lifeexpectancy because under certain conditions13 changes inthe absolute difference of female to male life expectancycan be a misleading indicator of the health effects ofevents. Therefore, if we measured the gender gap as theabsolute difference between the life expectancies ofwomen and men, it is possible that even though an equal


number of men and women die, the gender gap is stilldecreasing. This, in turn, implies that it is possible thatmale and female life expectancy can decrease by the samenumber of years and yet more men had died than women.Furthermore, equal proportional decreases in male andfemale life expectancy will lead to a larger absolute fall inthe life expectancy of the gender with the higher ex antelife expectancy—typically the female life expectancy. Thisproblem is accounted for if we measure the gender gap asthe ratio of female to male life expectancy. To be on thesafe side, we add the absolute change in population lifeexpectancy as a regressor. In simulations, we found thatusing the life expectancy ratio and controlling for theabsolute changes in population life expectancy removesthe distortions that result from the computation of lifeexpectancies.

In our view the IDB data are superior to all alterna-tives, but they do not come without potential drawbacks.Analyses of IDB data must almost necessarily suffer fromcorrelated errors, since models that are used to predictthe values of a certain variable can neither avoid sys-tematic errors nor guarantee serial independence ofobservations. The imputed data for year t11 cannot beindependent of the observation in year t, whether or notthat year is imputed. Any regression analysis based onthese data inherits these systematic errors. Fortunately,since we have panel data we can use a random-effectsestimator with an assumed first-order autoregressive er-ror that deals with the problem of autocorrelation (seethe Estimation Procedure subsection).

Women’s Socioeconomic Status

To measure the socioeconomic status of women insociety we use the measure of women’s economic andsocial rights from Cingranelli and Richards’s (2004)Human Rights Database. Using the annual U.S. StateDepartment’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,Cingranelli and Richards coded discrete variables foreconomic and social rights, each of which takes on oneof four values. We add both variables to create a com-bined measure of women’s socioeconomic rights (see theAppendix for details on the range of rights covered andthe coding scheme used). Unfortunately, this variable isonly available for 1981 onward, which restricts ouranalysis to the years 1981–2002, after which we have noinformation on other variables either.

Control Variables

Life expectancy and the gender gap therein areproducts of geographical, social, economic, and political

influences. Some of these influences could be correlatedwith the variables of our main interest. For instance, theexpected number of deaths in a disaster is negativelyrelated to the wealth of the country. Omitted variablescorrelated with the exogenous variables of interest causebias when they also exert an influence on the dependentvariable. To minimize bias, we follow two strategies: First,climatic and other geographical differences as well asgenetic conditions can impact the gender gap in lifeexpectancy and are (approximately) time-invariant (UNPopulation Division 1988). We therefore include re-gional dummy variables in our estimations. Second, withper capita income, political stability, and the level ofpolitical suppression we add three important time-vari-ant control variables. Data on per capita income aretaken from World Bank (2004). Regime stability is de-fined as the number of years since the most recent three-point change on the Polity score,14 which is a measure ofinstitutionalized democracy and autocracy popular inpolitical sciences, or the end of transition from a periodof lack of stable political institutions. Political suppres-sion is measured by data provided by Freedom House(2004), which bases its scale on expert judgment ofthe extent of violation of civil and political rights incountries.

Other socioeconomic variables of potential additionalinterest, such as health expenditures, access to food, andsafe water and clean sanitation are not available formany countries in our sample. Moreover, although theseverity of disasters is partly determined by per capitaincome (Kahn 2005) and (possibly) the level of de-mocracy, the infrequent occurrence of natural disasterseliminates the potential correlation between our controlvariables and disaster strength. In fact, the correlationcoefficient between disaster strength and the controlvariables does not exceed 0.06 in our sample. Therefore,from an econometric point of view, the inclusion of thesevariables is neither recommended nor warranted.

Estimation Procedure

Our data set consists of annual observations at thecountry level over the years 1981–2002 for up to 141countries, but the amount of information available foreach country may vary. Our data set therefore consists ofwhat is commonly known as cross-national, time-series,or unbalanced panel data. Analysis of panel data has todeal with the two classical problems of serial correlationand various types of unit heterogeneity. To obtain un-biased and efficient estimates of the model at hand,the estimation procedure of choice has to resolveboth problems without causing too many unwanted side


effects (Adolph, Butler, and Wilson 2005; Plumper,Troeger, and Manow 2005). As mentioned, we use arandom-effects estimator with an assumed first-orderautoregressive error that deals with the problem ofautocorrelation. To account for some heterogeneityacross countries, we include regional dummy variables.The regions are North America, Central America, SouthAmerica, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, West Africa,Southern Africa, Northern Africa, West Asia, South andEast Asia, and Australia and Oceania.

Estimation Results

Main Results

Our theory predicts a significantly negative effect ofthe disaster strength variable on the gender gap in lifeexpectancy, and a significantly positive interaction effectbetween women’s rights and disaster strength. Table 2reports the results from two estimates: model 1 is thebaseline model that merely includes disaster strength,women’s socioeconomic rights, and their interaction ef-fect; Table 3 adds the control variables. A comparison ofthe two models shows that the addition of the controlsmakes practically no difference to the results on ourmain variables of interest.

Table 2 shows support for our hypotheses, for thegender gap in life expectancy declines with disasterstrength (Hypothesis 1). We also find that a higher levelof women’s socioeconomic rights offsets the negativeeffect of natural disasters on women, which supports oursecond hypothesis. The coefficient has the expected

positive sign and size,15 suggesting that the adverse effectof natural disasters on the gender gap in life expectancyis conditioned on the socioeconomic status of women insociety. In countries with better rights for women, theadverse impact of natural disasters on women’s life ex-pectancy relative to men vanishes.

Table 3. Extended estimation results

Model 1 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Change in population life expectancy 0.028 0.030 0.017 0.036 0.026(0.009)** (0.011)** (0.033) (0.010)** (0.009)**

Disaster deaths per thousand people ! 0.732 ! 0.743 ! 0.377 ! 1.005 ! 0.772(0.081)** (0.095)** (0.123)** (0.692) (0.083)**

Women’s socioeconomic rights ! 0.049 ! 0.050 ! 0.135 ! 0.028 ! 0.045(0.030) (0.039) (0.066)* (0.030) (0.030)

Disaster deaths " women’s socioeconomic rights 0.365 0.385 0.178 0.326 0.431(0.052)** (0.065)** (0.075)* (0.241) (0.060)**

Number of observations 2266 1491 894 2266 2266Number of countries 141 117 121 141 141R2 0.29 0.28 0.29 0.29 0.29Wald chi-square test 190.1** 146.9** 77.4** 108.9** 193.5**

Notes: Estimations include regional dummy variables and constant (coefficients not reported). Standard errors are in parentheses. Model 1 is the benchmarkmodel. Model 3 excludes developed countries. Model 4 excludes observations with fewer than 10 people killed. Model 5 excludes droughts and famines. Model 6includes only droughts and famines.*po0.05 (two-sided z-test)**po0.01.

Table 2. Natural disasters and the change in the gender gapin life expectancy

Model 1 Model 2

Change in population life expectancy 0.028 0.028(0.009)** (0.009)**

Disaster deaths per thousand people ! 0.732 ! 0.729(0.081)** (0.081)**

Women’s socioeconomic rights ! 0.049 ! 0.045(0.030) (0.030)

Disaster deaths x women’ssocioeconomic rights

0.365 0.365(0.052)** (0.052)**

Per capita income ! 0.000(0.000)

Political stability ! 0.005(0.004)

Level of political freedom ! 0.072(0.021)**

Number of observations 2266 2241Number of countries 141 141R2 0.29 0.28Wald chi-square test 190.1** 206.3**

Notes: Estimations include regional dummy variables and constant (coeffi-cients not reported). Standard errors are in parentheses. Model 1 is thebaseline model that merely includes disaster strength, women’s socioeco-nomic rights, and their interaction effect; model 2 adds the control variables.**po0.01 (two-sided z-test)


Robustness Analysis

We conducted a number of robustness tests (see Table3), starting by replicating our model 1 for comparativepurposes. Our results show that the negative effect ofnatural disasters on the gender gap in life expectancydecreases with higher levels of women’s socioeconomicrights. Western countries are characterized by both lownatural disaster intensity (in terms of people killed rel-ative to population size) and high women’s socio-economic rights. This begs the question whether ourresults are perhaps driven by the inclusion of this groupof countries in our sample. To check this, in model 3 weexcluded from the sample Canada, the United States,and Western European countries as well as Japan, Aus-tralia and New Zealand. The results are hardly affected.Next, we have mentioned that what counts as a naturaldisaster in our source, EM-DAT, can be triggered by thedeclaration of a state of emergency or a call for inter-national assistance, which may be subject to politicalconsiderations. Another criterion, number of peoplekilled is ten or more, is far less subject to political in-fluence unless a country manages to hide or artificiallyinflate disaster deaths. To check that declarations ofstates of emergency and calls for international assistancedo not bias our results, we include in model 4 only ob-servations with ten or more people killed. The resultshold up. In model 5 we exclude droughts and faminesfrom the definition of natural disasters, as these areevents of a more chronic nature. The disaster strengthvariable and its interaction effect become marginallyinsignificant. However, this is due to the increase in thestandard error following the reduction in the variance ofthe disaster variable for the remaining disaster types,which renders estimation less efficient. But note that thecoefficients remain very similar. We do the opposite inmodel 6 and exclude all natural disasters other thandroughts and famines. Results from model 6 are againsimilar to results from model 1.

We have noted already that severe natural disastersare a rather rare event. Although the main results re-ported above support our theoretical expectations well,the question is whether they are driven by a few veryinfluential disaster observations. To check this, we nowapply a bootstrap estimation of standard errors. Thepurpose of this test is to see whether the statistical sig-nificance of our main variables of interest is robust or isdue to the particular population sample at hand. To savespace, we report only results of applying the bootstraptest on results of model 1. Applying it to the results formodel 2 as well makes little difference. The bootstrap is aresampling technique that sheds some light on the

distributional properties of statistics, but it is also usefulas a means of obtaining more robust standard errors. Thebootstrap algorithm draws repeated resamples (with re-placement) from the given population, and then esti-mates the model at hand. Hence, the sample that weestimate always has the same size as model 1, but thecomposition of the samples varies, because a single ob-servation from the original dataset can be drawn re-peatedly (which implies that other observation will notbe included in that estimate). Commonly used replica-tions are 100, 500, or 1,000. The t-statistics averagedacross a series of say 1,000 samples necessarily have alarger standard error than the model estimated on thebasis of the total population. Table 4 reports results onour variables of interest from the bootstrap test with1,000 replications. They suggest that the disasterstrength variable and its interaction effect with women’seconomic rights remain statistically significant even ifthe standard errors are bootstrapped. Moreover, we findthat the bias-corrected estimates of our coefficients andthe standard errors diverge no more than moderatelyfrom the results reported in Table 2. It is typically as-sumed that if the bias is larger than 25 percent of thestandard error of the sampling distribution, the biascorrected confidence intervals are likely to be more ap-propriate than the normal confidence intervals. In ourcase, the bias is smaller than 25 percent. Our interpre-tation of model 1 thus remains valid. In other words, wecan be fairly certain that the statistical significance of ourmain variables of interest do not depend on outliers.

Conclusion

Geographers and other social scientists have arguedfor many years that there is little that is natural aboutthe impact of natural disasters on affected people. AsO’Keefe, Westgate, and Wisner (1976) have put it in thetitle of their early contribution to Nature, ‘‘taking thenaturalness out of natural disasters’’ is what is needed.Natural disasters do not affect people equally as if by anarbitrary stroke of nature. Instead, the disaster impact iscontingent on the vulnerability of affected people, whichcan and often does systematically differ across economicclass, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

In this article, we addressed one specific impact ofnatural disasters (disaster mortality) and how it affectswomen differentially from men. We observed a systematiceffect of disaster strength on the gender gap in life ex-pectancy if the disaster affects societies in which the so-cioeconomic status of women is low. In such societies,natural disasters will kill directly, and indirectly via relatedpostdisaster events, more women than men or will kill


women at a younger age than men. These findings sup-port a vulnerability approach to natural disasters. Thereare few reasons why female life expectancy should besystematically more adversely affected by natural disastersthan that of men were it only for reasons determined bynature, such as biological and physiological differencesthat on average disadvantage women and girls relative tomen and boys. A systematic effect on the gender gap inlife expectancy is only plausible if natural disasters exac-erbate previously existing patterns of discrimination thatrender females more vulnerable to the fatal impact ofdisasters. That this is no mere speculation is demonstratedby the fact that the adverse impact of disasters on femalesrelative to men vanishes with rising socioeconomic statusof women. We acknowledge, however, that much moreinterdisciplinary research between medical and socialscientists is needed to fully understand the interplay be-tween mortality and gender in the presence of naturaldisasters. We also need more research to fully understandwhy and how disaster strength interacts with mortality ingeneral and with female mortality in particular.

Our findings require relevant stakeholders to go be-yond technical fixes in dealing with natural disasters.True, the underlying cultural, social, and economicpatterns that lead to a low socioeconomic status ofwomen and thereby generate their specific vulnerabilityto natural disasters are not easy to deal with. But thisdoes not mean that nothing can be done. Our findingthat, on average, large natural disasters lower the life

expectancy of women more than that of men, and par-ticularly so where women have a lower socioeconomicstatus, implies that policymakers, nongovernmental or-ganizations, and the academic community need to paycloser attention to the gendered nature of disaster vul-nerability. Such attention should focus on the specialmedical, economic, and security needs of women in theaftermath of disasters as well as on mechanisms to ensurefair and nondiscriminatory allocation of relief resources.Developing such policies will not entirely prevent theadverse impact of large-scale natural disasters on womenin societies where their everyday socioeconomic status islow. Such policies should, however, reduce the excessdisaster mortality of women compared to that of men.

Acknowledgments

Equal authorship. We would like to thank severalanonymous referees and commentators for many helpfuland constructive comments. Eric Neumayer acknowl-edges financial support from the Leverhulme Trust.

Appendix: Coding scheme for Cingranelliand Richards’s (2004) Women’s RightsMeasures

The measure of economic rights covers the following:

– Equal pay for equal work

Table 4. Estimation results with bootstrapped standard errors

Observed Bias Std. error Confidence Interval

Beta coefficientsDisaster deaths per thousand people ! 0.7448 0.1342 0.6685 ! 2.0565 0.5670 (N)

! 1.7311 0.3787 (P)! 1.7653 0.3511 (BC)

Women’s economic rights ! 0.0484 ! 0.0025 0.0390 ! 0.1248 0.0281 (N)! 0.1319 0.0214 (P)! 0.1291 0.0215 (BC)

Disaster deaths " women’s economic rights 0.3615 ! 0.0730 0.3250 ! 0.2763 0.9993 (N)! 0.1830 0.8356 (P)! 0.1595 0.8702 (BC)

Standard errors

Disaster deaths per thousand people 0.0762 0.0232 0.0764 ! 0.0737 0.2261 (N)0.0486 0.3538 (P)0.0490 0.3634 (BC)

Women’s economic rights 0.0284 ! 0.0011 0.0029 0.0227 0.0340 (N)0.0215 0.0332 (P)0.0236 0.0351 (BC)

Disaster deaths "Women’s economic rights 0.0488 0.0119 0.0315 ! 0.0130 0.1105 (N)0.0341 0.1623 (P)0.0310 0.1176 (BC)

Note: N 5 normal, P 5 percentile, BC 5 bias corrected.


– Free choice of profession or employment withoutthe need to obtain a husband or male relative’sconsent

– The right to gainful employment without the needto obtain a husband or male relative’s consent

– Equality in hiring and promotion practices– Job security (maternity leave, unemployment ben-

efits, no arbitrary firing or layoffs, etc.)– Nondiscrimination by employers– The right to be free from sexual harassment in the

workplace– The right to work at night– The right to work in occupations classified as

dangerous– The right to work in the military and the police

force.

The measure of social rights covers the following:

– The right to equal inheritance– The right to enter into marriage on a basis of

equality with men– The right to travel abroad– The right to obtain a passport– The right to confer citizenship to children or a

husband– The right to initiate a divorce– The right to own, acquire, manage, and retain

property brought into marriage– The right to participate in social, cultural, and

community activities– The right to an education– The freedom to choose a residence/domicile– Freedom from female genital mutilation (FGM) of

children and of adults without their– consent– Freedom from forced sterilization.

The coding of the variables is as follows:

(0) There are no economic (social) rights for womenunder law and systematic discrimination based onsex may be built into the law. The governmenttolerates a high level of discrimination againstwomen.

(1) There are some economic (social) rights forwomen under law. However, in practice, thegovernment does not enforce the laws effectivelyor enforcement of laws is weak. The governmenttolerates a moderate level of discrimination againstwomen.

(2) There are some economic (social) rights forwomen under law. In practice, the government

DOES enforce these laws effectively. However,the government still tolerates a low level of dis-crimination against women.

(3) All or nearly all of women’s economic (social)rights are guaranteed by law. In practice, thegovernment fully and vigorously enforces theselaws. The government tolerates none or almostno discrimination against women.

Notes

1. We agree with Varley (1994, 4f.) that the vulnerabilityapproach as an analytical concept is applicable even if onedoes not subscribe to the critique of capitalism embraced bysome of its proponents (see Wisner 2000a, 2000b, and thereferences cited in Varley 1994, 4). Albala-Bertrand (1993)applies the vulnerability approach within the framework ofmainstream economics.

2. Cutter (2003, 7–8) herself describes a number of mostsignificant themes for a geographical research agenda ofvulnerability science.

3. See Plumper and Neumayer (2006) for similar results onthe influence of militarized conflict on the gender gap in lifeexpectancy.

4. Indeed, based on twin research, medical research hasdemonstrated that ‘environmental factors’ (year of birth,region, childhood living conditions, and education) influ-enced body-height (Silventoinen, Lahelma, and Rahonen2000). This research shows that biological sex differencesare not independent of gender relations—though of coursegender differences fall far short of explaining physicaldifferences across sexes in its entirety.

5. Other reasons include the typical out-migration of men,which makes them vulnerable to accidents, attacks and theacquisition of infectious diseases, as well as the reducedfertility rate of women during famines compared to non-famine years (Dyson 1991b; Macintyre 2002).

6. De Waal (1989), however, finds no significant sex differ-ences in child excess mortality in his case study of faminemortality during 1984/85 in Darfur, Sudan, except for theage group between five and nine where more boys seem tohave died.

7. While Aquino, Steisel, and Kay (1992) argue that unequaldistribution of resources leads to less cooperation, Kramer(1990) demonstrates that not only does an increase in re-source scarcity foster cooperation, the increase in cooper-ation may even partly offset the adverse effects of scarcity.More recently, Hausken (1995) has shown that within-group competition increases if between-group competitionbecomes fiercer. His findings suggest that resource scarcitymay actually increase both cooperation and conflict in asociety. Our argument here is consistent with all these di-verse arguments and findings, as we simply claim that ifresources become scarce, distributive issues become moreimportant. Under this condition, the extent of cooperationdetermines how many individuals will suffer; societal norms,however, determine which individuals will suffer the most.

8. This is true even for highly developed countries like theUnited States as the televised pictures of New Orleans inthe wake of hurricane Katrina showed so vividly. The


overview article by Fothergill and Peek (2004) demon-strates that this represents a general pattern.

9. Seager (2005), in a commentary published by the ChicagoTribune, presented anecdotal evidence according to whichmost people trapped in New Orleans in the aftermath ofhurricane Katrina were (black) women (see also Seager2006). She estimates that 80 percent of those who did notleave the city within time were women and speculates that asimilar ratio will apply to the sex difference in fatalities.However, at least as concerns direct and identified victimsfrom Katrina, the statistics published by the State of Loui-siana’s Department of Health and Hospitals would suggestthat while the victims were predominantly old and AfricanAmerican, an about equal number of men and women died(http://www.dhh.louisiana.gov/offices/publications/pubs-192/Deceased%20Victims_2-23-2006_information.pdf; last acce-ssed 11 July 2006). The possibility remains that more womenmay have died in the aftermath of and as the indirect con-sequence of Katrina.

10. The argument that the average life expectancy may remainconstant if the female life expectancy declines while themale life expectancy increases is not valid, because naturaldisasters do not increase the life expectancy of a largesubgroup of the population.

11. Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has de-veloped new data on Disability Adjusted Life Years (DA-LYs) lost that represent a very comprehensive and data-intensive measure with less measurement errors than thestandard life expectancy measures. DALYs are calculatedfor individual major disease categories and reflect the yearsof life lost due to death in the fatal cases as well as theexpected disability caused by a disease in non-fatal cases.The great disadvantage is that DALYs are not yet availableover a longer period of time, allowing only a cross-sectionalanalysis, which is a major drawback as explained in the text.Also, while non-adjusted life expectancy is theoreticallyinferior to disability-adjusted life expectancy, we note thatthe WHO itself has pointed out that the two are very highlycorrelated (Mathers et al. 2001, Fig. 4).

12. Reasons were manifold. While Andreev et al. (2003) holdthe Russian health care system responsible, other sourcesreport a steep increase in alcohol abuse and deaths fromorganized crime (McKee 1999).

13. Changes in mortality rates of a specific age cohort affect alsoperson-years lived of older age cohorts due to changes tothe number of survivors to older age and this has a largereffect on life expectancy at birth if the life expectancy of theage cohort is higher (Preston, Heuveline, and Guillot 2001,64). Natural disasters would lead to relatively largerchanges in the gender gap in life expectancy if the personskilled have not yet reached age cohorts that show largegender differences in mortality rates. For example, if mostindividuals killed in a disaster and its aftermath are below30 years old and if women above 30 are less likely to die at acertain age than men of the same age and women’s lifeexpectancy at birth is higher, then the change in the ab-solute difference between female and male life expectancy isa biased proxy for the mortality rates of that conflict.

14. Polity score data, housed at the Center for InternationalDevelopment and Conflict Management at the Universityof Maryland, are available at http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/.

15. Given the estimated coefficients, theoretically there existcombinations of high values of both disaster strength andwomen’s economic rights that would suggest an overallincrease in the gender gap in life expectancy. However, suchcombinations do not exist in our sample.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London WC2A 2AE,United Kingdom, e-mail: [email protected] (Neumayer); Department of Government, University of Essex and Max-Planck Institute ofEconomics, Jena, [email protected] (Plumper).


UNITED NATIONS

Division for the Advancement of WomenDepartment of Economic

and Social Affairs

Edwina S

andys

April 2004

PUBLISHED TO PROMOTE THE GOALS OF THE BEIJING DECLARATION AND THE PLATFORM FOR ACTION

asdf

Making RiskyEnvironments Safer

women2000 and beyond April 2004

2

Introduction

We trap water by making sectionsof clay pipe; we then arrange these inline with the beds. We place one ontop of the others, which we will use topour water through. We then plant ourvegetables on top of them. We putgrass on other beds so that the waterdoes not dry up . . . We did not knowhow to conserve water but now wecan conserve water. We did not knowthe crops which were suitable for ourtype of soil. Now we know them; there-fore we can find ways to survive . . .Now we can go to other places andcome back with different technology,and those other people will also learnsomething from us—we will be shar-ing like that. (Francisca Chiuswa, Chivi,Zimbabwe)3

Drought is a fact of life in Zimbabweand neighbouring States. The womenwhose hard work produces food forfamilies are often ignored in agriculturaltraining programmes. In contrast, theapproach adopted by the IntermediateTechnology Group in Chivi helped Fran-cisca and other women farmers con-serve water and cope with droughtconditions. Most importantly, thisapproach was built around the centralrole of women as resource conserversand community leaders in natural haz-ard mitigation and disaster reduction.

This story of women taking the leadto build disaster-resilient communitiescontrasts vividly with the more familiarimages of women as passive andneedy victims flashed around the worldin the aftermath of every major disas-ter. Rarely do disaster stories and pho-tos fail to showcase male heroism andfemale vulnerability. Who can forgetthe desperate scenes from Mozam-bique of childbirth in the treetops abovefloodwaters? Dominant views of dis-aster remain framed by gender-biasedperspectives which ignore or distort thecomplex realities of both women’s andmen’s experiences in natural disasters.Seeing disasters “through the eyes ofwomen” challenges the notion of peo-

Making RiskyEnvironments Safer

We tend to discuss sustainable development and disaster reduction as two separate “components”.However, fundamentally, the aims of both are similar. Sustainable development is not reachable andcomplete unless disaster reduction is an essentialelement in it, and disaster reduction is not somethingwhich can be discussed, removed from development.Gender as an issue is in-built and cuts across both.Therefore, in reaching gender equality, the methods ofanalysis and tools of application can be the same.(Madhavi Ariyabandu, Programme Manager, DisasterMitigation, Duryog Nivaran, Sri Lanka, 2001)1

It is important to stress that gender equality in disaster reduction requires,above all, empowering women to have an increasing role in leadership, man-agement and decision-making positions. (Sálvano Briceño, Director, InternationalStrategy for Disaster Reduction, Geneva, 2001)2

Women buildingsustainable and disaster-resilient communities

Natural disasters—particularly ero-sion and other forms of soil degra-dation, pollution of freshwaters,shoreline erosion, flooding, loss ofwetlands, drought and desertifi-cation—impact directly on womenin their roles as providers of food,water and fuel. Climate change canalso impact on women’s productiveroles since the physical impacts ofglobal warming—rising sea levels,flooding in low-lying delta areas and increased saltwater intrusion—can jeopardize sustainable liveli-hood strategies. Food security andfamily well-being are threatenedwhen the resource base on whichwomen rely to carry out their criti-cal roles and obtain supplementaryincomes is under-mined. . . .Effective risk assessment and

management require the activeinvolvement of local communitiesand civil society groups to ensuredecreased occurrence of disastersand reduced losses and costs whenthey do occur. The knowledge, con-tributions and potentials of bothwomen and men need to be iden-tified and utilized.

_______Source: Carolyn Hannan, Director,United Nations Division for theAdvancement of Women. State-ment at a round table panel anddiscussion organized by theDivision for the Advancement ofWomen and the NGO Committeeon the Status of Women, UnitedNations Headquarters, 17 January2002 (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/documents/Natdisas).

Women’s work and disaster risk management

April 2004 women2000 and beyond

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ple in hazardous environments as dis-aster victims and girls and women as“special populations” in special needof emergency relief. It balances analy-sis of women’s constraints and vulner-abilities in disaster contexts with a bet-ter understanding of their capacitiesand resources as environmental andsocial change agents.

Living in riskyenvironments

Large-scale natural disasters cap-tured the headlines in the first years ofthe twenty-first century: a massiveearthquake in India, widespread flood-ing and an urban flash flood in Bolivia,another unexpected volcanic eruption,persistent drought in some of theworld’s poorest lands, a major earth-quake compounding misery in northernAfghanistan. Less visible in the publicimagination were the recurring andlocalized landslides, floods and fiercestorms that also take a huge toll overthe long run. Called “small-scale” dis-asters by outsiders, these events carrysocial costs that are as high or higherthan catastrophic events emphasizedby the media.

Increasing risks and therising toll of disasters

Despite the development of newinformation and communication sys-tems, technological advances, increasedtechnical expertise, and sophisticatedemergency relief systems, most of theworld’s people are still at great risk ofharm due to natural disasters. But therisk of natural disaster such as poverty,pollution or epidemics is not equally dis-tributed among people or regions.4Consider, for example, that: • During the 1990s, approximately

211 million persons were affectedor killed by natural disasters, seventimes as many as those hurt or killedin armed conflict;

• As many as 100,000 people die eachyear due to natural disasters;

• Though there has been some suc-cess in reducing the toll of majorenvironmental disasters, natural dis-asters kill an average of 1,300 peo-ple every week;

• The vast majority of disaster deathsoccur in developing countries;

• In most disasters, where sex-specific data are available, morewomen than men lose their lives;

• Quantifiable economic costs mayexceed $300 billion a year by 2050;and

• Extensive economic losses sustainedin developed nations between 1985and 1999 reached 2.5 per cent ofGDP while the world’s poorest coun-tries collectively lost 13.4 per cent ofGDP. Slow or sudden (drought versus

cyclone), small-scale or catastrophic(small landslide versus major earth-quake), disasters take a huge toll onpeople and places. Natural disasterscan create new opportunities, andsome groups may prosper economi-cally, but disasters first and foremostdamage and destroy lives, livelihoods,infrastructure and environments. Manysurvivors take disasters in stride, justas they do the challenges of poverty orwidowhood, but they may also experi-ence lingering effects on their health,security, psychological well-being,sense of place and cultural identity.

The vocabulary of riskand vulnerability

Familiar ecosystems may well havedeveloped through repeated exposureto the very forest fires or floods thatpeople may experience as disasters.Certainly, “not every natural distur-bance is a disaster, and not every dis-aster is completely natural”.5 Disastersarise squarely within the human expe-rience. Across the globe, it is humanaction that creates the conditions fortransforming naturally occurring events

such as earthquakes or volcanic erup-tions into human tragedies. Culturesand landscapes differ, so the “riskscape” of disaster is differently con-figured in every community.

To end the cycle of “disaster bydesign”,6 the complex impacts of globaldevelopment on natural ecosystemsand resources must be understood.This understanding must inform effortsto change the “normal” state of affairsthrough which extreme environmentalconditions or events become humandisasters in order to intervene in the disaster-development-disaster cycle.

The term disaster is understood verydifferently by those who use it. In someparts of the world, there is no one wordfor “disaster” but many words for whatmakes life “dangerous” or “risky”.7Risk is always relative: it is a functionof people’s relative exposure to physi-cal or natural hazards (such as earth-quakes) and people’s social vulnerabil-ity to the effects of the hazard (peoplewith strong houses are less vulnerableto earthquake). Risk is also a functionof people’s relative ability to reducetheir own vulnerability to the hazard (forexample, through public education in allcommunity languages, using commu-nication outlets appropriate for personswith disabilities, different ethnic andage groups, etc.), and to reduce theeffects of hazards (for example, wherehospitals are retrofitted or constructedto withstand seismic motion, peopleare at reduced risk).

By disaster, people may refer to gen-ocide, epidemics, economic depres-sions, explosions and accidents, com-plex emergencies combining armedconflict and environmental stress—orsimply the routine social conditionsmaking everyday life a disaster. The fol-lowing discussion focuses on environ-mental disasters.

Environmental or natural disasterscan be meteorological, such as forestfires, windstorms, landslides, droughtsor extreme temperature events. Theycan also be based on geophysicalprocesses like earthquake and volcanic

eruption. While environmental or nat-ural disasters are set into motion bynaturally occurring environmental haz-ards, they are also social processesgrounded in the social organization ofpeople. The hazards people havealways faced (meteorological orweather-related, or geophysical, involv-ing earth movement) as well as newones (for example, global warming,toxic contamination) are often acceptedas inevitable aspects of everyday life.

Physical vulnerabilities may be struc-tural in nature, such as housing built inflood plains or earthquake zones. Socialvulnerabilities are based on differencesand inequalities among people. Theseinclude physical differences (consider, forexample, the mobility barriers of the veryyoung and very old), but especially reflectdifferences in social power structures(for example, based on sex, race or eth-nicity, social class or age). These inequal-ities put people in places, jobs, housesand situations, which either increase orreduce their ability to anticipate, preparefor, survive, cope with and recover fromthe effects of natural disasters.

It is important to note that vulnera-bility is not inherent in persons (for

example, the disabled, women, theelderly), but follows from systems andstructures of inequality, which convertdifferences to inequalities (for example,lack of attention in disaster contexts tothe capacities or needs of people withdisabilities, or constraints due to oldage). Nor are vulnerable people help-less people, though women in particu-lar are often seen only as needing“special” assistance. In other words,vulnerability to hazards is not given butcreated. “Vulnerability is consequentnot on hazard but on particular social,economic and political processes.Disaster is an extreme situation, whichresults from these processes.”8

Mitigation of risky environmentalconditions and events involves actionstaken to reduce risk and make peoplemore secure, for example, when defor-ested hillsides are terraced and rain-waters harvested in drought-proneareas. Some forms of structural miti-gation, such as levees and dams, canreduce flooding but may have negativeeffects downstream or on people’s cul-tural and economic survival. Buildingcodes can be strengthened and land-use planning implemented to prevent

development in areas exposed to theeffects of hazards such as flood plainsor known seismic zones.

Early warnings, evacuation centresand effective emergency relief andrehabilitation systems are other formsof mitigation as are preparednessmeasures at the household and neigh-bourhood levels. People make theirlives and livelihoods more securethrough mitigation but also by prepar-ing against the eventuality of small firesbecoming firestorms and stormsbecoming hurricanes. Practising emer-gency evacuation plans in homes andinstitutions, preparing and storingreserves of food and water, and edu-cating children about the need to beprepared are only the most obviousexamples. Mitigation and preparednessare not ad hoc activities before andafter disaster occurrences but ongoingactivities of daily life in communitiesconstructed around ecologically sounduse of resources, sustainable eco-nomic growth, human developmentand social justice.

Mitigation and preparedness needto be complemented by vulnerabilityreduction. The risk of disaster can bereduced by identifying hazards, takingprecautions and preventing evidentharm, but disasters cannot be pre-vented without identifying and address-ing the root causes of people’s sociallyconstructed vulnerability to natural hazards. Despite significant advancesin emergency preparedness andresponse in many parts of the world,people continue to be at very great riskof harm from the effects of natural dis-asters. Global development patternscarry some of the root causes of thevery hazardous living conditions thatshape the lives and futures of increas-ing numbers of people. Megacities andover-development of coastal areas, forexample, are phenomena that put mil-lions of people in risky living conditions.Development priorities which do notprovide for sustainable use of naturalresources or promote social develop-ment and the enjoyment of human


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A natural disaster is the resultof the impact of a natural haz-ard on a socio-economic sys-tem with a given level of vul-nerability, which prevents theaffected society from copingadequately with this impact.Natural hazards themselvesdo not necessarily lead to dis-asters. It is only their inter-action with people and theirenvironment that generatesimpacts, which may reachdisastrous proportions.

A disaster is usually definedas a serious disruption of the

functioning of society, caus-ing widespread human,material or environmentallosses which exceed the abil-ity of the affected society tocope using only its ownresources.

________Source: International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Count-ering Disasters, Targeting Vulner-ability (Information Kit, 2001). The Centre for Research on theEpidemiology of Disasters alsooffers a glossary of core con-cepts (www.cred.be/emdat/glossary.htm).

What is a natural disaster?


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rights deprive millions of people of goodhealth, income, secure housing, infor-mation, social networks and otherresources vital to surviving a devastat-ing cyclone or flood. The number of peo-ple in water-stressed countries, forexample, is expected to rise from 1.7billion to 5 billion by 2025. Growingreliance on highly integrated “lifeline”infrastructures of communication,power and transportation also increasesvulnerability to the effects of disruption,whether from accidental failure, sabo-tage or an ice storm or earthquake.

Grounded both in mitigation and invulnerability reduction, disaster resili-ence (the “bounce back” factor) existsat the individual, household, organiza-tional and institutional levels. Risk-reducing approaches to disastersenhance people’s disaster resilience,but no clear separation of resiliencefrom vulnerability exists. People andplaces can be highly vulnerable in somerespects (a wealthy family in a seasidemansion, for example) and highlyresilient in other respects (the family

will have savings, income and insur-ance to rebuild or relocate). Disaster-resilient communities are areas wherepeople have identified local risks, tak-ing into account all relevant hazards aswell as social vulnerabilities to them,assessed local resources and capaci-ties and organized steps to reducethese risks. Such efforts cannot beundertaken successfully without appre-ciating the differential impacts of dis-asters on girls and women, as com-pared to boys and men, or without thefull use of the skills, knowledge andcommitment of both women and menin building disaster-resilient societies.

Girls and women are affecteddirectly and indirectly by disaster-causing trends and patterns, in waysthat can be similar to those on menand boys, but also in substantially dif-ferent ways. Too often, girls’ andwomen’s vulnerability is misunder-stood as derivative (for example,women are disproportionately poor,hence disproportionately vulnerable todisaster) or subsumed under othercategories (for example, illiteracyincreases vulnerability, and women aredisproportionately illiterate). In these

instances, the critical aspect of genderrelations and the persistent subordina-tion of and discrimination againstwomen, and the relevance of suchinequalities for disaster prevention andmitigation, remain unexamined.

Development of capacities andresources—skills, knowledge and abil-ities, including sound environmentalpractices, strong community ties andproactive community organizations—which are needed in the face of haz-ards and disasters requires a gender-specific approach that explicitlyaddresses women’s needs, prioritiesand constraints as well as those ofmen to achieve optimum results.Women’s groups and networks oftenplay a critical role in developing suchcapacities.

New approaches tohazards and disasters

Disasters are still more likely to beseen as isolated occurrences rather thancomplex social processes. Taking thisnarrow view fosters an ad hoc, event-focused approach based on “managing”

While we cannot do awaywith natural hazards, wecan eliminate those thatwe cause, minimize thosewe exacerbate and reduceour vulnerability to most.Doing this requireshealthy and resilient com-munities and ecosystems.Viewed in this light, disas-ter mitigation is clearlypart of a broader strategyof sustainable develop-ment—making communi-ties and nations socially,economically and ecologi-cally sustainable.

_________Source: Janet Abramovitz,“Averting unnatural disasters”,State of the World 2001(New York, Worldwatch Institute, W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 137.

Emergency managementapproach:

• Focus on the emergencyitself and actions carriedout before and after;

• Objectives are to reducelosses, damage and disrup-tion when disasters occurand to enable rapid recovery.

_________Source: S. Jeggilos, “Fundamen-tals of risk management”, Risk,Sustainable Development &Disasters: Southern Perspectives,Ailsa Holloway, ed., (Cape Town,University of Cape Town, PeriperiPublications, 1999), p. 9.

Disaster risk managementapproach:

• Focus is on the underlyingconditions of risk, whichlead to disaster occurrence;

• Objective is to increasecapacity to manage andreduce risks, and thus theoccurrence and magnitudeof disasters.

What is the risk management approach to disasters?

catastrophic events, generally throughmale-dominated “command and con-trol” emergency management systemsbased on technological expertise andthe easy assumption that outside helpis needed for disaster “victims”.

With growing recognition of the lim-ited effectiveness of this approach, newavenues are being explored in devel-oping and developed nations alike. Inthis new framework, disasters areviewed as a social process that unfoldsin a particular political, economic, his-torical, social and cultural context. Fromthis perspective, reducing the risk of dis-asters, rather than managing disastrousevents, is the top priority. This beginswith understanding risk factors in par-ticular places and times.

Local knowledge is the first elementfor effective disaster reduction.Communities that are knowledgeableabout mitigating local hazards and reduc-ing their own social vulnerabilities andhave an appreciation of indigenous andhistorical coping strategies as well asoutside emergency preparedness andresponse resources are better able toprevent extreme environmental eventsfrom becoming human disasters. Whenthe next flood occurs, as it surely will,people will rebuild in ways that reduce,not reinforce or recreate, their exposureto hazards—for example, by relocatinghomes or planting trees to restoredenuded hills causing landslides.

Where disaster managementapproaches perpetuate a view thatwomen have “special” needs that cre-ate additional difficulties for reliefworkers, women’s subordination isreinforced. The alternative approachnow emerging invites attention to gen-der relations, the priorities and needsof women as well as men, and thedivision of labour in households, com-munities and in the public sphere. Thisapproach highlights women’s criticalroles as resource users and managers,and takes advantage of their role insocial change and of their contributionthroughout the disaster process orcycle. Recognizing that neither sus-

tainable development nor disasterreduction can be realized without theempowerment of women, women andmen are treated as full and equal part-ners in the hard work of building disaster-resilient communities.

Women at riskin disasters

Far from unmediated “natural”events arising from human settlementin an inherently uncertain environment,natural disasters are social processesprecipitated by environmental events,but grounded in historical developmentpatterns and social relations, of whichgender relations are a core component.Though not uniformly or universally,women are often both uniquely vul-nerable to the effects of degraded envi-ronments subject to natural hazardsand uniquely positioned as “keys to dis-aster prevention”.

Gender roles put women in

hazardous positions

Effective management of naturalresources and effective policies toreduce risks or respond to natural dis-asters require a clear understanding ofgender-based differences and inequali-ties. Lack of such understanding canlead to the perpetuation or reinforce-ment of such gender-based inequalitiesand other dimensions of social vulner-ability in the provision of emergencyrelief and in long-term reconstructionprocesses.

Women tend to be over-representedin highly vulnerable social groups,whose ability to prepare for, survive andcope with disasters is severely limited.Such groups include rural populationsthat remain behind when men migrateto urban centres for work—the frail,elderly, refugees and displaced per-sons, single heads of poor households,and those living with chronic health

problems. Gender-based inequalitiesand disadvantages are often com-pounded by factors such as race, class,ethnicity or age, which lead to great dif-ferences in women’s experiences indisasters.

While gender roles vary culturallyand historically, they often create riskyliving conditions for women both in “normal” and extreme periods.Women who are poor or economicallyinsecure are less resilient to disasters.Earning an income and providing fortheir families puts women on the frontlines of hazardous work on a daily basis.Other factors, such as elevated levelsof malnutrition and chronic illness, lowlevels of schooling and literacy, lack ofinformation and training, inadequatetransportation, and cultural limitationson mobility, can also reduce women’sresilience to disaster. Caring for otherstakes many women’s lives when sud-den choices must be made about self-preservation or rescue of children andothers. Because their lives are so oftenconfined to the home, girls and womenare correspondingly more exposedthan men to death and injury whenbuildings collapse. Lack of secure hous-ing and land rights and relative lack ofcontrol over natural resources, risk ofdomestic and sexual violence, and bar-riers to full participation in decision-making affecting environmental man-agement and public policy are otherfactors that can increase women’s vul-nerability to natural disasters, andreduce their ability to prepare for, sur-vive and recover from devastating mud-slides or fires robbing them of liveli-hood, health, security and community.

Degraded environments and theirgender-specific impact

Not universally, but often, it iswomen’s relationship to the naturalworld that most directly puts them atrisk and motivates their efforts to makelife safer and more secure.


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Girls and women have significantopportunities as resource users andmanagers as well as environmentalconsumers, producers, educators andactivists to impact on their natural envi-ronment. That impact may be no morebenign than men’s—and sometimeswhat women do makes natural disas-ters more likely. For instance, like land-less men, women are less likely toadapt sustainable farming practiceswhen they do not own their land. Inmany parts of the world, “women’sfood crops are relegated to rented,steeply sloped land with erosive soils.Because tenure is not secure, womenhave little incentive to invest in soil con-servation”9 which might, in turn, mini-mize erosion and landslides. Driven intorefugee camps by disasters or armedconflict, or forced onto fragile lands bydestitution, women can also make mat-ters worse by overutilizing localresources to sustain life.

Degraded forests, polluted waters,eroded soils and other symptoms ofenvironmental stress impact on girls’and women’s time, educational oppor-tunities, economic status, health andhuman rights in a way that is frequentlygender-specific and based on societalexpectations about the roles of womenand men. Denuded forests, to chooseone example, force women or girls towalk long distances to gather justenough fuel wood for one spare meala day, preventing them from engagingin income-generating or educationalactivities. Overburdened and poorlynourished girls and women are corre-spondingly less able to resist thehunger, illness and despair that a cata-strophic flood will bring.

The environmental impacts ofwomen’s work, their roles as familyeducators and the significance of theirdecisions as consumers have madesustainability a key issue for womenand women’s movements around theworld. With respect to resource-dependent employment, women areon the front lines of environmental con-servation and stewardship as their

livelihoods and the health and well-being of their families and communi-ties depend upon it.

As key environmental actors,women’s priorities, values, abilities andactivities increasingly shape the move-ment to prevent environmental disas-ters and toward environmental sus-tainability.

Natural disasters and their

gender-specific impact

When women and men confrontroutine or catastrophic disasters, theirresponses tend to mirror their status,role and position in society. Accountsof disaster situations worldwide showthat responsibilities follow traditionalgender roles, with women’s work car-rying over from traditional tasks in thehome and household, and men takingon leadership positions.

Gender-based inequalities can putwomen and girls at high risk and makethem particularly vulnerable during nat-ural disasters. There are many casual-

ties among women in disasters, forexample, if they do not receive timelywarnings or other information abouthazards and risks or if their mobility isrestricted or otherwise affected due tocultural or social constraints. Fieldaccounts repeatedly demonstrate howunwritten or unexamined policies andpractices disadvantage girls andwomen in emergencies, for example,marginalizing them in food distributionsystems, limiting their access to paidrelief work programmes and excludingthem from decision-making positions inrelief and reconstruction efforts.Emergency relief workers’ lack ofawareness of gender-based inequali-ties can further perpetuate gender biasand put women at an increased disad-vantage in access to relief measuresand other opportunities and benefits.

The direct and indirect impact of dis-asters on women’s lives and liveli-hoods extend to their aftermath.Gender-based attitudes and stereo-types can complicate and extendwomen’s recovery, for example, ifwomen do not seek or receive timelycare for physical and mental trauma


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. . . The deterioration of nat-ural resources displaces com-munities, especially women,from income-generatingactivities, while greatlyadding to unremuneratedwork. In both urban andrural areas, environmentaldegradation results in nega-tive effects on the health,well-being and quality of lifeof the population at large,especially girls and womenof all ages. Particular atten-tion and recognition shouldbe given to the role and spe-cial situation of women liv-ing in rural areas and those

working in the agriculturalsector, . . . Environmentalrisks in the home and work-place may have a dispropor-tionate impact on women’shealth because of women’sdifferent susceptibilities tothe toxic effects of variouschemicals. These risks towomen’s health are particu-larly high in urban areas, aswell as in low-income areaswhere there is a high con-centration of pollutingindustrial facilities._________Source: Beijing Platform forAction, para. 247.

Effects of environmental degradation on women

experienced in disasters. Domesticwork increases enormously when sup-port systems such as childcare,schools, clinics, public transportationand family networks are disrupted ordestroyed. Damaged living spaces aredamaged working spaces for allwomen. For those whose income isbased in the home, the loss of hous-ing often means the loss of work-space, tools, equipment, inventory,supplies and markets. In addition tofarmers, whose small land plots, live-stock, tool, seeds and supplies may be

lost, waged farm workers, migrantworkers and women employed as con-tingent labour in the informal sector,lose work and income. Assetsintended to provide for girls’ educationor marriage are likely to be sold—per-haps even girl children themselveswhen no other alternatives can befound. Domestic violence appears toincrease in the aftermath of disastersand lack of alternative housing after aflood or earthquake makes it evenmore difficult for women wanting toleave violent relationships.

Women reducing riskand responding

to disasters

The critical link between genderequality, sustainable development anddisaster reduction is not women’s vul-nerability or even what happens togirls and women in fierce storms orlong droughts, but women’s roles longbefore and even longer after suchoccurrences. Women’s social positionidentifies them as “keys to preven-tion” of natural disasters, to borrowthe language of the United NationsInternational Decade for NaturalDisaster Reduction (IDNDR). Buildingon their strengths—women’s knowl-edge of local people and ecosystems,their skills and abilities, social net-works and community organizations—helps communities mitigate hazardousconditions and events, respond effec-tively to disasters when they do occur,and rebuild in ways that leave peoplemore, not less, resilient to the effectsof subsequent disasters.

The case studies below showwomen acting in ways that promotewise use of the environment andmore egalitarian social relationshipsand institutions. In this sense, womenand women’s empowerment areindeed central to the development ofan integrated global social movementtoward sustainable development andnatural disaster reduction. The casestudies cover examples wherewomen are mitigating environmentalhazards; take local action to assessdisaster vulnerabilities and copingcapacities; raise awareness about,and prepare for, disasters; andrespond to urgent needs. They alsoillustrate the many types of situations,constraints and opportunities that are specific to women’s social, eco-nomic or cultural roles and responsi-bilities, but that need to be factoredinto, and taken advantage of in effec-tive, gender-sensitive disaster pre-vention and mitigation planning.

Because rural women’s workis so highly resource-dependent, they sufferimmediate unemploymentand indirect loss from theripple effects of degradednatural resources. Waterresources are a case in point.Already undependable watersources were rendered use-less in some cases by theearthquake, while elsewherethe quality of water deter-iorated. As women areresponsible for water gather-ing, more limited water sup-plies translates into less timefor income-generating work.Lack of water also obviouslyreduces women’s opportuni-ties to earn money throughwaged labour on local farms.When alterations in hydro-logic systems salinized water,women whose incomedepends on water may lose areliable, if limited, source ofincome. Women salt farmers,who are 50 per cent of themigratory labour force to theLittle Rann, are at risk oflong-lasting economic stress

under these conditions,which may force them out ofvillages and into informalwork in cities. Women’s localknowledge and historicalperspective on naturalresource-based employmentis an essential asset to eco-nomic planners working atthe community level. Theirwork as guardians, users andmanagers of scarce naturalresources positions them asexperts in the decisions tocome about how to rebuild inways that mitigate damagefrom future disasters. Acrosscastes, classes and ages,women’s “inside out” per-spectives on environments,disasters and developmentmust be brought to bear onthe question of reconstruct-ing Gujarat’s economy. _________Source: Elaine Enarson, “Wewant work”, Rural Women in theGujarat drought and Earthquake.Quick-Response Research GrantReport to the Natural HazardsResearch and Information Center(www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/qr135/qr135.html).


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Impacts of drought and earthquake on rural women in Gujarat, India


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Women mitigate environmental hazards

As providers and producers, womenare often able to help make their house-holds, neighbourhoods and communi-ties less vulnerable to the effects of nat-ural hazards and disasters. Strategiesrange from collaborative action toactivism at the grass-roots level.

Women’s collaborative action,women’s skills and knowledge aboutlocal conditions can form the basis forbetter preparedness for environmentalstress. This is apparent in a northerndistrict of Gujarat, India, where womenorganized a collective to ensure amplesupplies of fodder to maintain their live-stock during drought periods, therebyalso securing continuous milk suppliesfor women and more secure householdincome.

Women’s technological innovationscan bring solutions to environmentalproblems. Women “char-dwellers” inBangladesh increase food security bycomposting kitchen waste to produce

soil-enriching fertilizer. They prepare forfloods by securing fodder for their live-stock, planting trees around the lowhouses they build with local materialswith cross-supports against strongwinds and selecting fast-growingseedlings to make char soils more sta-ble. To preserve rainwater, they coatthe pits they dig with cow dung.10

Since women earn their living fromplants and materials, they havebecome active players in a multi-stake-holder forum researching sustainabilityproblems. After studying local prob-lems, the Jinga Urban Women’sWetlands Project in Uganda waslaunched to promote alternativeincome-generating strategies, includingalternatives to farming techniques thathad contributed to the loss of wetlands.Wetland preservation is a vital strategyfor managing recurrent floods in theregion.11

Women community workers andnetworkers often take the initiative topromote hazard mitigation at the locallevel. In the aftermath of a destructivebushfire in Australia, for example,

mainly women responded when a localwoman put out a call for fire preven-tion volunteers. The women then maderegular personal visits at the start ofthe fire season to all families in thearea, helping people clear brush aroundtheir homes and otherwise reduce theirvulnerability to fire. Local authoritiesopposed the programme, which ransuccessfully for a number of years, andeventually appointed a male bushfireeducation and prevention officer.“Since his appointment, no pamphletshave been distributed, no one calls toremind or help people clear their land,and no one calls on the frail or elderlyto work out evacuation plans.”12

Women can be resource conserversto meet the needs of their families, ani-mals and crops. The community-basedDisaster Mitigation Institute (DMI) andthe Self-Employed Women’s Associ-ation (SEWA) (a labour union and socialnetwork for low-income women) werealready well known in the regions hithardest by the January 2001 earth-quake in the state of Gujarat, India,which also suffered from years ofsevere drought. Water conservationwas all the more important after theearthquake as seismic changesdestroyed or damaged many wells,ponds and storage tanks and, in someplaces, rendered fresh water too saltyfor use. The work of SEWA and DMIwith local women before the earth-quake to promote rainwater harvestingthrough household containers andcommunity wells and ponds was aninvaluable resource in drought-strickencommunities struggling to recoverfrom this highly destructive earthquake.

In nearby Banaskantha, the UnitedNations Development Programme(UNDP) is working with local women’sassociations in 75 villages on projectsaimed at “developing a sustainableapproach to combat desertificationthrough integrated water resourcemanagement and economic empower-ment. About 40,000 women areinvolved in this programme and are tak-ing action to combat desertification

The fodder security system forthe women of Banaskanthaputs people at the centre of itsstrategy. It moves away fromone-off relief measures andprovides a long-term develop-ment solution to mitigatingthe effects of drought and tostrengthening a community’scapacity to prepare for theonset of the disaster. Womenhave the responsibility for fod-der security and for maintain-ing the family during drought.They have benefited from thesystem in several ways. Foddersecurity has given them foodsecurity and increased their

opportunities for earning income. Reduction in migra-tion has reduced the pressureof their responsibilities as menbegin to remain in the villagethroughout the dry season. Ata more strategic level, womenare participating in the publicsphere alongside men in thedecision-making relating tothe scheme._________Source: Mihir Bhatt, “Maintainingfamilies in drought India: thefodder security system of theBanaskantha women”, in P.Fernando and V. Fernando, eds.,South Asian Women FacingDisasters, Securing Life, p. 44.

Women increase food security

through building and lining ponds, har-vesting rain water and reviving tradi-tional irrigation systems.”13

The resourceful women farmers ofKathaka, Kenya, where soil erosion isa serious problem, are another exam-ple of resource conservation. Voluntaryself-help groups consisting mainly ofwomen from the same farm neigh-bourhood were organized into 12 dif-ferent groups to build terraces, damsand drains, which help stabilize soils,and, thus, reduce the exposure ofwomen farmers to erosion in stormsand floods.14

Women are survivors with copingskills whose knowledge helps protectfragile environments and people at risk.As primary providers and caregivers,women historically have struggled tosustain life during wars, economiccrises, epidemics, civil disturbance—and in the face of hazards and disas-ters. Their skills and knowledge are amajor resource in hazard-prone com-munities subject to extreme weatherevents and environmental occurrences.Their labour in home gardens and smallplots of land provides more nutritiousfood and increases local self-sufficiency,for example through seed banks andthe preservation of indigenous species.Women may also diversify their incomein this way as a hedge against the con-stant threat of extreme disaster losses.It follows that disaster recovery pro-grammes should, though they often donot, “help to re-build [women’s homegardens], with tools and seed distribu-tion, irrigation systems, credit, seedlingbanks, and other resources in the sameway that similar resources are providedfor cash-crop production.”15

During the drought in southernAfrica during the early 1990s, Oxfam16

helped increase food security and dis-aster resilience by working only withelected committees comprised equallyof women and men. Soon known as“the Oxfam women”, these electedrepresentatives worked very effectivelyin small groups to distribute relief foodand share labour, land and tools. “That’s

when we found out our developmentwork with these women’s groups hadnot just given them an opportunity togrow more food, but an opportunity togain insight into their problems, to gainself-confidence, and to articulate that inpublic and really take on anybody. Sothese women were, if you like, the van-guard leaders of the moment.”17

Women are grass-roots activistswhose mobilization against destructiveand short-sighted development projectsis recognized around the world. Theirrole in the Chipko movement againstdeforestation in India is the most vividexample. Women were also at the fore-

front of passive resistance to the Nar-mada Dam, believed by many tothreaten cultural and economic survivaland create long-term water manage-ment problems in India. In 1998,women took the lead in massivedemonstrations which shut down workon the dam, if only temporarily. “Pro-tests against the damming of theNarmada began more than 10 yearsago, and thousands of women havesaid they are prepared to drown ratherthan move”, it is reported.18

A women’s resource centre inZimbabwe organized a local-level com-munity workshop to consider strategies


10

Some of women’s copingstrategies are:

• Women put more time,effort and energy intowork.

• Women start specific activ-ities aimed at makingavailable more naturalresources and increasingthe supply. Examples ofthese include . . . treeplanting and reforestationand forest conservationactivities. Women estab-lish kitchen gardens neartheir houses, install waterpoints, and regeneratedegraded land . . .

• Women economize on theuse of resources. A com-mon strategy is, for exam-ple, shifting to other foodproducts which need lesscooking time (often theseproducts are less nutri-tious), limiting the num-ber of cooked meals or theboiling of water (with allits health consequences).Another possibility is the

use of energy/resources-saving devices . . .

• Another issue which hasbeen taken up by groupsof women is recycling. In situations of waterscarcity, for example, theymanage to recycle andreuse water for several pur-poses.

• Women also look intousing alternatives such assolar and wind energy forcooking, switching toalternative crops, orchanging planting pat-terns or technology.

• Women organize to pre-vent pollution or theyclean up waste sites.

_________Source: Irene Dankelman, Gender and environment:lessons to learn. Observer paper prepared for the expertgroup meeting organized by theDivision for the Advancement of Women, Ankara, Turkey,November 2001 (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/env_manage/index.html).

Women cope with environmental degradation


11

for mitigating drought conditions. Thiseffort highlighted the significance ofwomen’s insecure land rights. In short,women lacking ownership or securetenure were much less likely to partici-pate in aforestation projects and otheractivities useful for coping with drought.The link between women’s right to land,disaster mitigation and sustainabilitywas evident to the people withoutwater: “Women should enjoy the samerights to arable land as men, the sameaccess to extension services, and agri-cultural credit, and equal control of agri-cultural produce and income. This willincrease women’s ability to plan for andmaintain greater food self-sufficiency at[the] household level, with cumulativeeffects at [the] local level. While noth-ing can prevent drought, such reformswould enable women to plan for foodproduction and make provision for a pos-sible drought in the following season.”19

Women assess disaster vulnerabilities and capacities locally

“All mitigation is local.”20 Althoughcommunity assessments are generallyconducted by outside researchers orrelief agencies, it is local people whohave specific knowledge about the par-ticular vulnerabilities of individuals,social groups and institutions and aboutparticular coping strategies traditionallyadopted by local people. Women’s par-ticipation in such assessments is criti-cal: “Women’s indigenous knowledgeand practice of environmental manage-ment increases the coping capacity ofcommunities in environmentally fragileand hazardous areas and thus con-tributes to their survival.”21 The follow-ing examples illustrate this point.

Grass-roots women know local peo-ple’s needs and strengths, for example,in the Caribbean basin. Four women’scommunity-based organizations (CBOs)in the Dominican Republic and St. Luciaare winding up the first phase of a two-year project to map risk in their com-

munities, including the daily disastersthat characterize low-income women’slives, and the hurricanes, landslides andfires, to which they are exposed. Withtraining in basic research methods, thecommunity women conducted inter-views, recorded life histories, devel-oped photo essays and drew risk mapsto assess their own strengths and thedangers they face. This information isbeing compiled into CommunityVulnerability Profiles to be used by com-munity leaders and shared with localemergency managers. A set of practi-cal Guidelines for Working with Womento Assess Disaster Vulnerability hasbeen produced to help guide women’scommunity groups, as well as emer-gency agencies, in assessments of thiskind.22

Women learners and educatorsincrease capacity to cope with naturaldisasters. Working from an adult edu-cation model, two women researchersand activists produced a set of gender-sensitive participatory learning activitiesfor disaster mitigation for use in south-ern Africa. Assessing women’s liveli-hood in disaster contexts is a core com-ponent of the training. Workshopparticipants are provided with informa-tion about how gender relates to disas-ter risk, and helped to recognize genderdynamics within the small work groupsas they are being trained in risk man-agement.23

Women enhance community healthby taking the initiative in many contextsto identify and address communityhealth problems arising from environ-mental pollution and contamination. Thiswas evident in Malabon in thePhilippines, for example, followingextreme flooding. The local club of theSoroptimists International organizedtwo well-attended workshops with theparticipation of all stakeholders. In thefirst workshop, Soroptimist women andothers worked with participants toaddress the structural causes of flood-ing; in the second, they outlined a num-ber of possible short- and long-termresponses.24

Women increaseawareness about, andprepare for disasters

Risk assessments are the basis forlocal emergency planning and pre-paredness projects. Women’s partici-pation in these efforts is critical as theirknowledge, social position and roleswill ensure a more comprehensiveapproach to preparing for disasters.

Women have environmental scienceexpertise and managerial skills in largerproportions than ever before, althoughtheir representation in emergency man-agement and in environmental scienceprofessions and organizations varieswidely between organizations andacross regions. An emergency man-ager from the western United States,for example, noted the need for cul-turally appropriate and inclusive pre-paredness materials in her region, writ-ing, “We can make a difference inpeople’s lives when we empowerwomen of other cultures with theknowledge to mitigate, respond andrecover from a disaster.”25 Gender bal-ance in risk reduction projects and inemergency management is a neces-sary first step.26

Women’s experience as effectivecommunity educators, especially thoseinvolved in family education and theschool system, enhances their capac-ity for awareness raising and disasterpreparation. In the Caribbean, to takeone example, it was observed thatolder women’s views about risk arecredible because children have greatrespect for what their “grandmotheralways said.”27

In Hawaii, women involved in ElNiño task forces in the late 1990sdeveloped public education pro-grammes targeting local villages to pro-mote water conservation and publichealth measures. Campaigning to treatsuspect groundwater before drinking,they helped reduce the incidence ofreported diarrheal disease significantly.By targeting women with forecasts and


12

warning information, the effects of thishazard were significantly reduced.28

Eking out a living on the fringes ofgreat cities, poor women have littleauthority but much responsibility formeeting urgent family needs, includingwaste disposal and water conservation.The World Health Organization (WHO)collaborated with local tenants’ com-mittees in urban slum areas aroundAlexandria, Egypt, to identify youngwomen for training. Environmental sci-entists from area universities taughtthem for six weeks about sound envi-ronmental practices, including waste-water management. Known as “envi-ronmental promoters”, the youngwomen earned new respect from local,male-dominated municipal authorities,and built on their environmental know-ledge to lobby municipal authorities forimprovements in the informal settle-ment, such as paving roads subject toflooding.29

When the town of La Masica,Honduras, reported no deaths afterHurricane Mitch, women’s extensiveinvolvement in community educationprogrammes undertaken by the localCentral American disaster reductionagency six months earlier was praised.“Gender lectures were given and, con-sequently, the community decided thatmen and women should participateequally in all hazard management activ-ities. When Mitch struck, the munici-pality was prepared and vacated thearea promptly, thus avoiding deaths . .. [Women] also took over from menwho had abandoned the task of con-tinuous monitoring of the early warn-ing system.” Some 20 years earlier, asimilar pattern developed in Hondurasafter Hurricane Fifi when womenstepped in to carry on soil conservationmeasures abandoned by men.30

Women volunteer more in pre-paredness projects before disasters

occur rather than after disasters hap-pen, when men may be freer to leavethe household and offer assistance tostrangers.31 For example, women arehighly active in neighbourhood-basedemergency preparedness programmesin Canada and the United States, espe-cially among middle-class women withgreater control over their personal timeand other resources.32

Women respond tourgent needs

Much of women’s work in disastersis socially invisible, undervalued andunacknowledged. However, women’sresponses to emergencies through theirlocal organizations, such as labourunions, cultural associations, anti-violence networks and communitydevelopment groups, as well as throughaccessing international relief resources,make a real difference in realizingspeedy and effective relief in a disaster.

Following earthquakes in India andTurkey, women’s groups were veryproactive in assessing relief needs andhelping women receive equitableshares of supplies.33 The Foundationfor the Support of Women’s Work(FSSW), a Turkish non-governmentalorganization (NGO), built on theresources of its many women and chil-dren centres to respond to earthquakesurvivors. These centres, which sup-port local women’s savings groups,childcare, income-generation projectsand other activities, proved invaluableafter the catastrophic earthquake of1999. Significantly, women’s earth-quake response efforts also inspiredtenant women to organize housingcooperatives. The women and devel-opment group Swayam ShikshanPrayog (SSP) helped construct housingand community centres in Gujarat.34

In the Dominican Republic, for ex-ample, Ce Mujer, a non-governmentalorganization, was very involved secur-ing outside assistance for villagers hitby Hurricane George. Observers

We recognize that risks andimpacts of environmentalcrises and natural disasters areexperienced by women andmen differently and are medi-ated by their differentialaccess to and control overresources . . . We also recog-nize that development policiesand practices in the AsiaPacific region often ignore theneed for preserving theintegrity of the environmentwhere people and communi-ties can sustain and improveupon their livelihoods. Thishas contributed to unprece-dented environmental vulner-ability leading to more fre-quent recurrence of naturalevents that are more extensivein impacts . . . We stronglybelieve that a human rightsbased approach is particularly

important for a genderedanalysis of environmentalcrises and natural disaster sit-uations. We urge memberStates to recognize the impactof development policies andprojects on environmentalcrises and natural disastersthat manifest themselves in anaggravated and differentiatedmanner for women, causingthe loss of their income, work-space and livelihoods; and,often, leading to destitutionand denial of women’s humanrights._______Source: Nilufar Matin, Asia PacificForum on Women, Law and Devel-opment, “Women’s human rightsconsiderations in environmentalmanagement and mitigation ofnatural disasters”. Presented to theUnited Nations Commission on theStatus of Women, 6 March 2002.

Women at risk in the Asia Pacific region


13

reported that “community members,especially males, changed their viewsof women . . . Women created betterrelationships with local authorities andthis experience proved women’s capac-ity for leadership.”35 In 1999, women’scentres affiliated with the NicaraguanWomen’s Network against Violenceresponded immediately to HurricaneMitch by distributing basic supplies.Working in cooperation with the localcouncil and mayor, the women’s cen-tres took responsibility for house con-struction “because of the previousexperience in this area and their net-works in the affected communities.”Women from the United Kingdom par-ticipated in a women’s reconstructionbrigade to Nicaragua to assist the cen-tres.36

Recognizing women’s urgent needfor income following the Gujarat earth-quake, the Self-Employed Women’sAssociation (SEWA) not only helpeddirect and deliver emergency suppliessuch as food, clothing and water butalso provided craft kits to women intents.37 Working with the DisasterMitigation Institute, SEWA representa-tives also visited rural women to assessthe indirect economic impacts of thedrought and the earthquake, ensuringthat the livelihoods of these womenwere clearly addressed in governmentrehabilitation programmes. In oneregion of Gujarat, a team of five womenoperating independently of municipalauthorities managed the local watersystem that brought water to four vil-lages in the arid lands of Surendranagar.A reporter described their efforts in acrisis: “When the quake damaged thepipe connecting the overhead waterstorage tank, of 4.5 lakh litres capacity,it was these women, along with SEWAmembers (mostly salt workers), whomustered the courage of climbing atopthe structure and repaired the damage.The mason simply fled and refused todo anything as there were frequenttremors.”38

Local women’s organizations can beinvaluable partners for outside organi-

zations responding to natural disasters.The International Labour Organization,for instance, was able to capitalize onits strong relationship with SEWA inrehabilitation efforts for craft workersand other earthquake-affected women.The United Nations DevelopmentProgramme (UNDP) partnered with theGovernment of Norway and women’sassociations in 180 impacted villages inthe region to develop livelihood reha-bilitation projects targeting womencraft workers.39

National and international women’sorganizations, including business andprofessional women’s associations,microcredit and savings groups andwomen’s banks, faith-based women’sgroups, and women organized aroundpolitical and feminist goals frequentlyhelp women in disaster situations.40

National organizations may workthrough local membership chapters. Inthe wake of Miami’s Hurricane Andrew,for example, the National Associationof Women Business Owners started anew relief fund to raise money for localmembers and sent new office equip-ment and other needed supplies.41

A World Food Programme staffer inNicaragua during Hurricane Mitchobserved the multifaceted contribu-tions of individual women during andafter disasters, such as the following:“After the storm subsided, interna-tional aid began entering the area nearher village. She saw that the villageleader, a man who lost his farm, wasmore concerned about his own needsthan those of other village members. . . So she travelled to the mayor’soffice, where she had never beenbefore. She visited the Peace Corpsvolunteer in town, whom she did notknow. Through her dedication, persis-tence, and patience, she had sevenhouses built and legally put in thewife/mother’s name. She insisted thatlatrines be built for all families. She ral-lied for 10,000 trees to be planted onthe deforested hills that surrounded hervillage. She learned about water diver-sion tactics, and found an engineer to

teach her village to build gavion-walledchannels.”42

Communication between disasterrelief agencies and stricken communi-ties was impossible after HurricaneMitch. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, thecoordinator of a sustainable develop-ment project used new informationtechnologies such as LISTSERVs ande-mail to match needy communitiesand outside agencies. Eventually, acore group of 100 volunteers wasformed to analyse and circulate infor-mation about pressing needs and avail-able resources. Recognizing the lack ofInternet access in poor areas, the groupthen obtained outside funding to pro-vide computers and training to nearly800 people, “convinced these skills willreduce the vulnerability of Honduransto future disasters.”43

Women’s informal leadership is avital part of political life in most com-munities, as it certainly was when thecity of Manzanillo, in the Mexican stateof Colima, suffered the effects of a1995 earthquake. An existing neigh-bourhood organization, led mainly bywomen, was soon reborn as theCommittee of Reconstruction. “Theyassessed the damage to each houseand developed a plan to restore the dis-trict. They organized a neighbourhoodwatch to prevent theft, replaced thestreet signs themselves, and workedto get the water supply returned . . .The women in the neighbourhoodassociation have worked hard to solvethe problems that emerged after theearthquake. They affirm that their strug-gle is not political but rather for ‘thefamilies’ ’ well-being . . . According tothe women interviewed, women orga-nize more effectively than men todemand help. Men, in general, declineto participate, either because they areconvinced the Government has toserve them after paying their taxes orbecause they don’t want to be seenwith a group of women.”44

Increasingly, women also respond tonatural disasters in their role as emer-gency managers in public and private

agencies. While gender bias continuesto be a concern in most disaster orga-nizations and NGOs working on disasterissues, opportunities for women in male-dominated aspects of formal emergencymanagement work are expanding. In a1990 Caribbean study, just two of 22countries had female heads of nationalemergency management offices.45

Increasing these proportions is impor-tant, but no more so than bringing grass-roots women into all aspects of disasterreduction and response.46 Focusing onwomen’s skills, knowledge and abilitiesin key emergency management areas,such as health, can facilitate women’sparticipation.

How disaster resilience is strengthened by

gender equality

Capitalizing on the “window of opportunity”

during reconstruction

Disasters are complex socialprocesses. Their effects may be dif-fused, and difficult to anticipate or meas-ure. Economic gains and losses arecommon. Solidarity can increase ordecrease. Conflicts arising in the wakeof disasters quite frequently galvanizepeople and lead to calls for politicalchange, for example, in campaignsagainst governmental inefficiencies andinequalities. Once the short-lived periodof social unity (“therapeutic commu-nity” of disaster) has ended, however,social inequalities based on class,caste, race or ethnicity, age, physicalabilities and gender can quickly reap-pear.

As destructive as they are, naturaldisasters clearly offer many opportuni-ties for social change. Too often, how-ever, opportunities to address genderinequalities are overlooked in the rushto return to “normal” life, including“normal” gender norms, values and

stereotypes. Women’s work in theinformal sector, for example, is rarelyfactored into post-disaster economicrecovery measures, just as the specificemotional needs of boys and men areneglected in post-disaster mentalhealth programmes.

At the same time, though, there issome evidence that old rules can loseforce—if only temporarily—when peo-ple respond to the kinds of emergencyconditions produced by armed conflictand natural disasters. FollowingHurricane Mitch in Central America, forinstance, it was observed that moremen did more cooking and took moreresponsibility for childcare.47 During adrought period in Sri Lanka, as peoplebecame more dependent upon government-supplied water, men tookon more responsibility for providingdrinking water, ferrying home five-gal-lon plastic containers on push bicyclesor tractors.48 Women protestingagainst gender bias in relief and recov-ery programmes in Miami laid thegroundwork for ensuring that in futuredisasters gender perspectives wouldnot be ignored.

Addressing social inequalitiesdirectly after disasters is frequently part of women’s reconstruction work.When violence against womenincreased following Hurricane Mitch,Puntos de Encuentro, a non-governmental organization, integratedanti-violence education directly intopost-disaster recovery work. Workingthrough various media outlets, theorganization developed a communityeducation campaign to transmit thismessage: “Violence against women isone disaster that men can prevent.”One observer recalled, “It is clear fromthe looks on participants’ faces that thisworkshop is not only enabling them towork through the emotional difficultyof post-traumatic stress but also to con-sider the need for transforming genderroles in their community.” Like otherNGOs and women’s groups, Puntos deEncuentro was highly involved in hur-ricane relief and recovery but went

much further. Its proactive work aroundviolence against women promises tohelp limit violence against women infuture disasters and is a model for tak-ing advantage of the “window ofopportunity” to challenge structuralinequalities that undermine communitysolidarity in the face of disaster.49

The initiatives taken by Pattan, anon-governmental organization, inresponse to flooding in Pakistan in theearly 1990s is another example wheresocial inequalities were addresseddirectly in the aftermath of a disaster.Pattan workers ensured that women aswell as men were represented on vil-lage committees that advised on floodrelief projects. Observing women’s lackof security of housing, the NGOdeeded new homes constructed afterthe flood jointly in the names of womenand men and assisted illiterate womenin accounting procedures for makingloan repayments, in support of theirnew role as co-owners. A researcherwho studied Pattan’s work concluded:“It was the beginning of the processof empowerment in women’s lives.Now they are taking collective respon-sibility in many other projects and learn-ing how to perform new tasks well.They are gaining in confidence and self-esteem, which is an important steptoward women’s ability to take controlof their own lives, decreasing their vul-nerability in times of crisis.”50

Women increasingly take advantageof solidarity built in the midst of acalamity, and organize after disasters.Over 40 ethnic, cultural, social, religiousand economic women’s organizationsin Greater Miami came together as acoalition called Women Will Rebuild inthe wake of the l992 hurricane. Theymet regularly throughout the relief andrecovery period to reduce gender biasin measures taken. These organizationsworked with local media to highlightwomen’s and children’s needs and lob-bied for distributing donated and gov-ernment relief funds accordingly. Theirgoals of redirecting just 10 per cent ofavailable funds to women and children


14


15

and increasing the proportion ofwomen on the grant-making commit-tee of the male-dominated relief groupWe Will Rebuild were not met.However, Women Will Rebuild dideventually influence decisions to usemore relief funds for youth services andbrought more women into We WillRebuild. Working in coalition after a cri-sis helped Miami’s very dividedwomen’s community unite aroundshared goals, and raised hopes that theneeds and priorities of women and chil-dren will get due attention when thenext hurricane hits Miami.51

Nine years after Armenia’s destruc-tive 1988 Spitak earthquake, a smallgroup of women scientists organizedthe NGO Women for Development tohelp reduce social vulnerability to futureearthquakes. One of their importantprojects was the initiation of training forprimary- and middle-school teachersand pupils in seismic protection steps(“don’t be scared, be prepared!”). Thegroup also helped local and regionalgovernments in planning coordinatedearthquake response, and designedmass media campaigns highlighting therole of women in disaster prepared-ness. The group’s efforts conveyed “anew positive type of woman, who isnot only silently carrying the heavyresults of the disasters but is also readyto provide her knowledge and ability fordisaster mitigation.”52

Reconstruction efforts can also facil-itate the breaking down of barriers thatrestrict women’s full participation inmitigation, preparedness, responseand recovery activities, and help chal-lenge social divisions generally. Forinstance, when the German Red Crossand the Bangladesh Red Crescentcommitted to responding to the 1991cyclone in gender-sensitive ways, theentire community benefited. Gender-balanced village disaster preparednesscommittees were formed to providetraining to women. With men often outof town or engaged in fieldwork,women were trained how to save foodand belongings, and what items to take

to shelters. The relief committee alsosought to increase awareness amongwomen and men about the importanceof gender equality, and affordedwomen increased opportunities forexchanging ideas with other women.53

In the wake of natural disasters,opportunities for non-traditional skillsbuilding and employment oftenincrease, though existing gender-specific divisions of labour defines thebroad contours of both women’s andmen’s emergency response work. InIndia, women received skills training insafe housing construction techniquesafter the Latur and Gujarat earthquakes,working through community-basedwomen’s groups, mitigation agenciesand government recovery pro-grammes. They also helped designnew homes that better served theirwork-related as well as their residentialneeds. Some accounts from the UnitedStates suggest that after a flood or hur-ricane, women may manage home con-struction, organize work crews, learnand practise new home repair skills andnegotiate with insurance agents torebuild their homes. Others work in dis-tribution facilities, landscaping and con-struction during the recovery period.54

When half the population was dis-placed due to widespread volcaniceruption, women in Montserrat starteda new group called Women on theMove, which assisted women dis-placed from their homes and work-places by offering skills training in bothtraditional areas and non-traditionalfields such as information technologies.Through their efforts, more workbecame available for women on male-dominated construction sites, andwomen gained self-confidence andeconomic independence. The group’sconsensual decision-making processreportedly helped unite women trau-matized by the unfolding disaster thatdeprived them of their way of life. Notonly did Women on the Move advancewomen’s long-term recovery, it alsofostered faith in women’s “own abilityto shape and direct their lives” and

encouraged women to “enter into newrelationships with their men and thesociety in which they live.”55

Aftermaths of disasters have encour-aged new political campaigns. Whenbuilding facades were destroyed byMexico City’s 1985 earthquake, theworking conditions of costureras (gar-ment workers) were vividly exposed.Two days after the earthquake, womenfrom 42 factories created the Sep-tember 19 Garment Workers Union,which became the first independentunion to be recognized by the MexicanGovernment in over a decade. Oneobserver recalled the scene: “In thedays following, women came togetherto deal with the immediate problems offood, water, shelter, health care; theywere joined by family members whohad lost a wife, mother, sister or lover.The response of government officialsand the “patron”, the factory owner,fueled their grief into rage and createda popular movement that has rallied thesupport of women’s organizationsthroughout Mexico. While the costur-eras and family members begged gov-ernment officials to move in heavyequipment and personnel to search forsurvivors and recover the bodies, theowners had hired people to removeequipment and raw materials whilewomen were still buried in the rub-ble.”56

Women can gain greater influenceon government and emergencyresponse agencies when they areactively engaged throughout the disas-ter process. Following the 1993 earth-quake in northern India (Latur), a net-work of women’s groups and ruralassociations organized by SwayamShikshan Prayog (SSP) became “com-munity consultants”, interfacingbetween impacted communities andgovernment officials to promote disas-ter relief that advanced long-term com-munity development. Most signifi-cantly, they took on the role ofmonitoring the housing reconstructionprocess, training local women asobservers and technical consultants to

increase accountability and help ensureequitable redevelopment.

In addition to emergency relief,Turkish women working through theFoundation for the Support of Women’sWork (FSWW) mobilized in smallgroups to conduct post-disaster hous-ing surveys to document shortages andtenant needs. They visited local officialsto share this information and makeknown women’s housing and relatedneeds. They achieved increased levelsof public financing for childcare, moreopportunities for women in construc-tion work, and regular consultationsbetween affected women and otherstakeholders during the recoveryprocess.

International solidarity betweenwomen can also increase in the wakeof a major disaster. Following the 1999Marmara earthquake, personal visitsbetween disaster survivors in Turkeyand in India allowed women to ex-change valuable lessons about gender-sensitive disaster response and recon-struction. With support frominternational funders, representativesfrom the Swayam Shikshan Prayog(SSP) in India traveled to Turkey toshare their experiences with theFoundation for the Support of Women’sWork (FSWW) and other women’sgroups there. Back in India, over 100women leaders involved in the SSPresponse to the Latur earthquake trav-elled to Gujarat following the 2001earthquake, where they demonstratedthe technical and political skills they hadgained as reconstruction experts.

Promotion of gender-sensitive andpeople-centred reconstruction wasenhanced when these and otherwomen’s groups worked acrossnational boundaries. In Turkey, theFoundation for the Support of Women’sWork (FSWW) was a catalyst forincreased participation of grass-rootswomen in decision-making, activelypromoting local women’s interests andparticipation in the reconstructionprocess.57 Their efforts also helpednudge post-disaster activities from

emergency assistance to long-termdevelopment goals.58 The interventionof women also resulted in the birth ofDisaster Watch, a new initiative tomonitor disaster response for genderbias and to use the findings to increasegovernment accountability to genderequality throughout disaster responseand reconstruction.59

Women can be powerful advocatesfor safety when they are viewed asexperts and skilled communicators.This was the case in India when theGovernment of Norway and the UnitedNations Development Programme(UNDP) proposed to fund a radio pro-gramme produced and broadcast bywomen’s groups to “ensure access toinformation at all levels, which [is]essential to the community-led andcontrolled process of recovery andreconstruction being envisioned.”60

Where women’s radio is well estab-lished (as it is in Brazil, for example), itcan be a critical link to illiterate womenand a means for women’s networkingaround sustainable developmentissues and disaster reduction. Whenwomen control the medium and themessage, early warning systems aremuch more likely to reach all people.

Linking women’s empowerment,

sustainable development

and disaster reduction

“Pursue gender equality and gender-sensitive environmental managementand disaster reduction, response andrecovery as an integral part of sustain-able development.” This recom-mendation, included in the agreed con-clusions of the United NationsCommission on the Status of Women(CSW) of its 46th session in 2002, wasadopted by the Economic and SocialCouncil (ECOSOC) as a resolution andencouraged all social actors to makethe connection.61

How can a community in whichwomen are not safe to walk alone toan emergency cyclone shelter, nottrained to conserve the resourcesneeded to sustain daily life in disastersituations, not able to read and helpwrite useful emergency preparednessguides, or not free to attend a localworkshop on emergency relief or speakin a public meeting on land-use plan-ning be called either sustainable or disaster-resilient?

When women act to restore, pro-tect and enhance the ecosystems,upon which all life ultimately depends,they are helping to prevent disasters.When they identify hazards and reducevulnerability to natural disaster, they arehelping to promote sustainable devel-opment. And when the gender equal-ity goal is central to all efforts towardsustainability and disaster resilience,the creativity and commitment of allpeople can be harnessed. Conversely,when women and men are not equalpartners in these joint ventures, thegoals of sustainability and disasterresilience cannot be achieved.

Making connections

Many opportunities for linking dis-aster reduction, gender equality andsustainable development are missed.While the Beijing Platform for Action,for instance, reiterated that women“have an essential role to play in thedevelopment of sustainable and eco-logically sound consumption and pro-duction patterns and approaches of nat-ural resources management”,62 the linkto disaster reduction was not articu-lated. Much the same can be said ofthe many strong declarations, conven-tions and agreements resulting fromglobal conferences on disaster reduc-tion and on environmental, economicand social development themes, whichhave not, or have insufficiently, articu-lated the link to gender equality.

At the same time, the basis for mak-ing the connections is there. Similar to


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other global conferences on develop-ment, the Fourth World Conference onWomen acknowledged, “sustainabledevelopment policies that do notinvolve women and men alike will notsucceed in the long run. [These con-ferences] have called for the effectiveparticipation of women in the genera-tion of knowledge and environmentaleducation in decision-making and man-agement at all levels. Women’s expe-riences and contributions to an eco-logically sound environment musttherefore be central to the agenda forthe twenty-first century. Sustainabledevelopment will be an elusive goalunless women’s contribution to envi-ronmental management is recognizedand supported.”63

The World Summit on SustainableDevelopment, held in Johannesburg,South Africa, in 2002, reiterated a com-mitment to ensuring the integration ofwomen’s empowerment, emancipa-tion and gender equality into all activi-ties encompassed within Agenda 21,the Millennium Development Goalsand the Plan of Implementation of theSummit. More specifically, the Planalso makes the connection betweenpromotion of gender equality and anumber of priority areas, such aspoverty eradication, protection andmanagement of the natural resourcebase, and health for sustainable devel-opment.64 In May 2003, when elabo-rating its multi-year programme of workto implement the Summit Plan over thenext 12 years, the United NationsCommission on Sustainable Develop-ment decided that gender equalitywould be one of the cross-cuttingissues to be addressed in relation toeach of the thematic clusters theCommission would consider.65

Recognizing where and how theconcerns of gender equality, sustain-able development and disaster reduc-tion intersect will strengthen progressin each of them and also help trans-form visionary goals into practical andcoordinated steps toward safety, sus-tainability, gender equality and social

equity. Some of the connections thathave to be made are addressed below.

Gender equality, sustainability anddisaster reduction are intersectinggoals. Action to pursue goals and objec-tives specific to any one of them whilealso addressing the others in an inte-grated manner will build stronger andmore comprehensive advocacy andsocial change networks. When organi-zations active in any of these threeareas work together, they can moreeffectively advance the agenda of thethree movements. At present, theseareas remain compartmentalized andimportant connections are missed: theenvironmental justice movementsneglect gender perspectives andwomen’s disaster experiences; male-dominated disaster organizations paylittle attention to gender equality andsustainability; gender equality has notyet become a central aspect in thework of environmental groups andorganizations, though women areincreasingly involved; and women’smovements have failed to analyse thesocial construction of women’s vulner-ability in natural disasters.

Another connection can be madearound similar change strategies pur-sued in all three areas. Sustainabledevelopment, disaster reduction andgender equality are all promotedthrough (related but discrete) networksof NGOs and, at the international level,through negotiated conventions, trea-ties, and global agreements and decla-rations. Though disaster reduction hasnot yet galvanized an international socialmovement similar to the environmentalmovement or women’s mobilization, ithas a large and growing constituencycutting across regions and nations.Seeing risk broadly and through a gen-der lens makes evident the need forgender-responsive and community-based strategies for change.

A third connection can be madearound the root causes of natural dis-asters and unsustainable development,and their effects on gender equality.Deteriorating environments and reduc-tion in natural resources lead to dis-placement of communities, especiallywomen, from income-generating activ-ities, additional women’s unremuner-ated work and reduced capacity to

In Bangladesh, like in so manyother countries, women are nothelpless victims as so oftenportrayed. Since they have tosurvive in a hostile environ-ment throughout their lives,they have developed particularstrengths, determination andcourage. As well, when they areallowed to do so, they have amajor role to play in the plan-ning and implementation ofdisaster relief and rehabilita-tion. Their contribution to thehousehold income, for exam-ple, frequently keeps the wholefamily alive . . . There is nodebate nowadays that in anydisaster, women’s marginalposition in society makes

them more vulnerable to nat-ural disasters. Yet they are thekey to addressing disaster pre-paredness and rehabilitation.Correcting the inequitable distribution of resources andpower between men andwomen is the only way toachieve sustainable develop-ment and reduce the effects ofnatural disasters. Unleashingthe latent potential of womenshall become an integral partof disaster preparedness andmitigation.

_________Source: Royeka Kabir, “Bangla-desh: surviving the cyclone is notenough”, IDNDR Stop Disasters,vol. 24 (1995), p. 6.

Unleashing the potential of women


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cope with natural disasters. Climatevariations that affect subsistence agri-culture particularly threaten womenfarmers’ livelihoods and hence under-mine their capacity to prepare for,respond to and recover from naturaldisasters.

Gender-responsivedisaster reduction: the way forward

Gender is a significant factor in theconstruction of social vulnerability inrelation to risk of natural disasters, thedifferential impact of disasters andpotential for developing adequateresponses to hazards and disasters.66

Gender-based differences and inequali-ties put some women and girls in par-ticularly vulnerable situations. On theother hand, women should not only beseen as victims. Women are agents ofchange, actors and contributors at all levels. Full understanding of theroles, contributions and knowledge of women and men in relation to thenatural resource base is an essentialstarting point in working with naturaldisasters, particularly in terms of riskassessment and management. Emer-gency response and management mustexplicitly target women as well as menin all areas of support, based on therecognition that women’s involvementis essential to adequate recovery andpotential for sustainable developmentand reduction of natural disasters.

The United Nations Commission onthe Status of Women, at its 47th ses-sion in 2002, put forward for the firsttime a comprehensive set of global pol-icy recommendations, contained in theAnnex, to enhance women’s empow-erment and promote gender equality in situations of natural disasters.Implementation of these actions, by allconcerned stakeholders, is critical inaccelerating achievement of the mutu-ally reinforcing goals of gender equal-ity, sustainable development and dis-aster reduction.

In implementing these actions, sig-nificant impacts could be achievedthrough the following steps: • Policies, strategies and methodolo-

gies for disaster reduction should bepeople-centred and be based on con-sultative and participatory processes,that include all stakeholders, bothwomen and men. The particular con-straints to consultation and partici-pation in areas of great povertyshould be identified and addressed,including the gender-specific con-straints.

• The value-added of including socialdimensions, including gender per-spectives, in work on natural disas-ters needs to be made explicit. Thisrequires moving beyond a focus onwomen as victims to an approachthat recognizes the contributions andpotential of women as well as men.

• The research, experiences and goodpractices that exist on gender andenvironmental management, riskassessment and management andemergency management andresponse should be more systemat-ically compiled in a form that is use-ful to policy makers and administra-tors. Key areas where more researchis needed should be identified andresources made available for initiat-ing research projects based on par-ticipatory processes where both localwomen and men can be involved inidentifying vulnerabilities and sug-gesting remedies.

• One critical area of research shouldbe developing a better understand-ing of the linkages between gender,environmental management and dis-aster reduction, and the policy impli-cations of this knowledge.

• Generic guidelines need to be devel-oped on the types of gender-specificquestions that should be raised inrelation to environmental manage-ment, risk assessment and manage-ment and emergency response andmanagement. These guidelinesshould then be adapted in each spe-cific disaster context to ensure thatadequate attention is given to theneeds and priorities of both women

and men and that women as well asmen are consulted and given oppor-tunities for participation.

• Collection of sex-disaggregated datashould be obligatory in all areas ofwork on natural disasters. Wheresuch statistics are not available, thisshould be clearly pointed out as animportant gap to be rectified.

Annex

Agreed Conclusions onEnvironmental Managementand the Mitigation of NaturalDisasters, proposed by theUnited Nations Commissionon the Status of Women,forty-sixth session, 4-15 and25 March 2002, and adoptedas ECOSOC resolution 2002/5

1. The Commission on the Status ofWomen recalls that in the BeijingDeclaration and Platform for Action, itwas recognized that environmentaldegradation and disasters affect allhuman lives and often have a moredirect impact on women and that it wasrecommended that the role of womenand the environment be further inves-tigated. The twenty-third special ses-sion of the General Assembly (2000)identified natural disasters as a currentchallenge affecting the full implemen-tation of the Platform for Action andemphasized the need to incorporate agender perspective in the developmentand implementation of disaster pre-vention, mitigation and recovery strate-gies. The Commission also recalls theresolve in the United Nations Millen-nium Declaration (General Assemblyresolution 55/2) to intensify cooperationto reduce the number and effects ofnatural and man-made disasters, aswell as General Assembly resolution46/182, which contained the guidingprinciples on humanitarian assistance.2. Deeply convinced that economicdevelopment, social development andenvironmental protection are interde-


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pendent and mutually reinforcing com-ponents of sustainable development,which is the framework for our effortsto achieve a higher quality of life for allpeople.3. The Commission reiterates thestrategic objectives and actionsadopted by the Fourth World Con-ference on Women, held in Beijingin 1995, and in the outcome docu-ment of the twenty-third special ses-sion of the General Assembly, heldin New York in 2000, entitled“Women 2000: gender equality,development and peace for thetwenty-first century”.4. The Commission recognizes thatwomen play a vital role in disasterreduction (prevention, mitigation andpreparedness), response and recoveryand in natural resources management,that disaster situations aggravate vul-nerable conditions and that somewomen face particular vulnerabilities inthis context.5. The Commission also recognizesthat women’s strengths in dealing withdisasters and supporting their familiesand communities should be built uponfollowing disasters to rebuild andrestore their communities and mitigateagainst future disasters.6. The Commission recognizes theneed to enhance women’s capacitiesand institutional mechanisms torespond to disasters in order toenhance gender equality and theempowerment of women.7. The Commission urges Govern-ments and, as appropriate, also urgesthe relevant funds and programmes,organizations and the specialized agen-cies of the United Nations system, theinternational financial institutions, civilsociety, including the private sector andNGOs, and other stakeholders, to takethe following actions to accelerate im-plementation of these strategic objec-tives to address the needs of all women:(a) Pursue gender equality and gender-

sensitive environmental manage-ment and disaster reduction,response and recovery as an inte-

gral part of sustainable develop-ment;

(b) Take measures to integrate a gen-der perspective in the design andimplementation of, among otherthings, environmentally sound andsustainable resource and disastermanagement mechanisms andestablish mechanisms to reviewsuch efforts;

(c) Ensure the full participation ofwomen in sustainable developmentdecision-making and disaster reduc-tion management at all levels;

(d) Ensure the full enjoyment bywomen and girls of all humanrights—civil, cultural, economic,political and social, including theright to development-including indisaster reduction, response andrecovery; in this context, specialattention should be given to the pre-vention and prosecution of gender-based violence;

(e) Mainstream a gender perspectiveinto ongoing research by, inter alia,the academic sector on the impactof climate change, natural hazards,disasters and related environmentalvulnerability, including their rootcauses, and encourage the applica-tion of the results of this researchin policies and programmes;

(f) Collect demographic and socio-economic data and information dis-aggregated by sex and age, developnational gender-sensitive indicatorsand analyse gender differenceswith regard to environmental man-agement, disaster occurrence andassociated losses and risks and vul-nerability reduction;

(g) Develop, review and implement, asappropriate, with the involvementand participation of women’sgroups, gender sensitive laws, poli-cies and programmes, including onland-use and urbanization planning,natural resource and environmentalmanagement and integrated waterresources management, to provideopportunities to prevent and miti-gate damage;

(h) Encourage, as appropriate, thedevelopment and implementationof national building standards thattake into account natural hazards sothat women, men and their familiesare not exposed to high risk fromdisasters;

(i) Include gender analysis and meth-ods of mapping hazards and vul-nerabilities at the design stage ofall relevant development pro-grammes and projects in order toimprove the effectiveness of disas-ter risk management, involvingwomen and men equally;

(j) Ensure women’s equal access toinformation and formal and non-formal education on disaster reduc-tion, including through gender-sensitive early warning systems,and empower women to takerelated action in a timely and appro-priate manner;

(k) Promote income-generating activi-ties and employment opportunities,including through the provision ofmicrocredit and other financialinstruments, ensure equal accessto resources, in particular land andproperty ownership, including hous-ing, and take measures to empowerwomen as producers and con-sumers, in order to enhance thecapacity of women to respond todisasters;

(l) Design and implement gender-sensitive economic relief and recov-ery projects and ensure equal eco-nomic opportunities for women,including both in the formal andnon-formal sectors, taking intoaccount the loss of land and prop-erty, including housing and otherproductive and personal assets;

(m)Make women full and equal part-ners in the development of safercommunities and in determiningnational or local priorities for disas-ter reduction and incorporate localand indigenous knowledge, skillsand capacities into environmentalmanagement and disaster reduc-tion;


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(n) Support capacity-building at all levelsaimed at disaster reduction, basedon knowledge about women’s andmen’s needs and opportunities;

(o) Introduce formal and non-formaleducation and training programmesat all levels, including in the areasof science, technology and eco-nomics, with an integrated andgender-sensitive approach to envi-ronmentally sound and sustainableresource management and disasterreduction, response and recoveryin order to change behaviour andattitudes in rural and urban areas;

(p) Ensure the implementation of theircommitments by all Governmentsmade in Agenda 21 and the BeijingPlatform for Action and the out-come document of the twenty-thirdspecial session of the GeneralAssembly, including those in theareas of financial and technicalassistance and the transfer of envi-ronmentally sound technologies tothe developing countries, andensure that a gender perspective ismainstreamed into all such assist-ance and transfers;

(q) Document good practice andlessons-learned, particularly fromeffective community-based strate-gies for disaster reduction,response and recovery, whichactively involve women as well asmen, and widely disseminate thisinformation to all stakeholders;

(r) Improve and develop physical andmental health programmes, serv-ices and social support networks forwomen who suffer from the effectsof natural disasters, includingtrauma;

(s) Strengthen the capacities of min-istries, emergency authorities, prac-titioners and communities to applya gender-sensitive approach to envi-ronmental management and disas-ter reduction and the involvement ofwomen professionals and fieldworkers;

(t) Forge constructive partnershipsbetween Governments, interna-

tional organizations and civil society,including the private sector andNGOs, and other stakeholders inintegrated and gender-sensitive,sustainable development initiativesto reduce environmental risks;

(u) Encourage civil society, includingNGOs, to mainstream a genderperspective in the promotion of sus-tainable development initiatives,including in disaster reduction;

(v) Ensure coordination in the UnitedNations system, including the fulland active participation of funds,programmes and specialized agen-cies to mainstream a gender per-spective in sustainable developmentincluding, inter alia, environmentalmanagement and disaster reductionactivities.

8. The Commission on the Status ofWomen calls for the integration of agender perspective in the implementa-tion of all policies and treaties relatedto sustainable development and in thereview of the implementation of theYokohama Strategy for a Safer World:Guidelines for Natural Disaster Pre-vention, Preparedness and Mitigationand its Plan of Action, scheduled for2004. 9. The Commission on the Status ofWomen welcomes the InternationalStrategy for Disaster Reduction effortsto mainstream a gender perspective inthe mitigation of disasters.10. The Commission on the Status ofWomen welcomes the policy state-ment of the Inter-agency StandingCommittee for the integration of a gen-der perspective in humanitarian affairsof 31 May 1999.11. The Commission on the Status ofWomen welcomes the convening ofthe International Conference onFinancing for Development29 and takesnote of the recognition contained in thedraft Monterrey Consensus of the par-ticular needs of women and the impor-tance of gender equality and theempowerment of women, as well asthe recognition of the impact of disas-ters.

12. The Commission on the Status ofWomen also welcomes the conveningof the World Summit on SustainableDevelopment, to be held in Johan-nesburg, stresses the importance ofgender mainstreaming throughout theprocess and urges gender balance inthe composition of delegations as wellas the involvement and full participa-tion of women in the preparations,work and outcome of the WorldSummit, thus renewing the commit-ment to gender equality objectives atthe international level. The Commissionon the Status of Women further reit-erates that all States and all people shallcooperate in the essential task of erad-icating poverty as an indispensablerequirement for sustainable develop-ment, in order to decrease the dispar-ities in standards of living and bettermeet the needs of the majority of thepeople of the world.

Suggested readings

Piers Blaikie and others, At Risk:Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability,and Disasters (London, Rutledge,2002).Susan Cutter, “The forgotten casualties:women, children, and environmentalchange”, Global Environmental Change:Human and Policy Dimensions, vol. 5,No. 3 (1995), pp. 181-194.Patricia Delaney and Elizabeth Shrader,Gender and Post-disaster Recon-struction: The Case of Hurricane Mitchin Honduras and Nicaragua (Washing-ton, D.C., World Bank, 2001). Availablefrom www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn. Department of Humanitarian Affairs,DHA News Focus: Women in Emergen-cies, vol. 22, No. 22 (April/May 1997).Elaine Enarson, Responding to Do-mestic Violence in Disaster: Guidelinesfor Women’s Services and DisasterPractitioners (University of British Columbia, 1997). Available fromwww.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn. Elaine Enarson, A Gender Analysis ofWork and Employment Issues in


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Natural Disasters, InFocus Programmeon Crisis and Reconstruction (Inter-national Labour Organization, 2000).Available from www.ilo.org orwww.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn.Elaine Enarson and Maureen Fordham,“From women’s needs to women’srights in disasters”, EnvironmentalHazards, vol. 3, No. 3/4 (December2001).Elaine Enarson and Betty HearnMorrow, eds., The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Women’s Eyes(Westport, Greenwood, 1998). Avail-able through the International HurricaneCenter of Florida International Uni-versity, Miami, FL (www. fiu.edu/~lsbr).Priyanty Fernando and Vijitha Fernando,eds., South Asian Women FacingDisasters, Securing Life, (Colombo,Intermediate Technology Publicationsfor Duryog Nivaran, 1997).Maureen Fordham, “Making womenvisible in disasters: problematising theprivate domain”, Disasters, vol. 22, No. 2 (1998), pp. 126-143.Alice Fothergill, “Gender, risk, and disas-ter”, [literature review] InternationalJournal of Mass Emergencies and Disas-ters, vol. 14, No. 1 (1996), pp. 33-56.Kenneth Hewitt, Regions of Risk: AGeographical Introduction to Disasters(Essex, Longman, 1997).Ailsa Holloway, ed., Risk, SustainableDevelopment and Disasters: SouthernPerspectives (Cape Town, University ofCape Town, Periperi Publications,1999).International Decade for NaturalDisaster Reduction, Stop Disasters—Special feature: Women and Children:Keys to Prevention, vol. 24 (1995) and“Prevention pays: success stories fea-turing women and children”, FactSheet #1 1995.Andrew Maskrey, Disaster Mitigation:A Community Based Approach (Oxford,Oxfam, 1989).Betty Hearn Morrow and BrendaPhillips, eds., “Special issue on Womenand Disasters”, International Journal ofMass Emergencies and Disasters, vol.17, No.1 (1999).

Anthony Oliver-Smith and SusannaHoffman, eds., The Angry Earth:Disaster in Anthropological Perspective(New York, Routledge, 1999).PanAmerican Health Organization,Gender and Natural Disasters.Spanish/English Fact Sheet 2001. Alsoavailable from www.paho.org.Walter Gillis Peacock and others, eds.,Hurricane Andrew: Race, Gender andthe Sociology of Disaster (London,Routledge, 1997).Dianne Rocheleau and others, eds.,Feminist Political Ecology: GlobalIssues and Local Experiences (NewYork, Routledge, 1996).John Twigg and Mihir Bhatt, eds.,Understanding Vulnerability: SouthAsian Perspectives (Colombo, Inter-mediate Technology Publications forDuryog Nivaran, 1998).US AID, “Unsung heroines: womenand natural disasters”, GenderMatters, Information Bulletin, No. 8(2000).United Nations, “Environmental man-agement and mitigation of natural dis-asters: a gender perspective”, chapterII, Thematic issues before the Com-mission on the Status of Women,Report of the Secretary-General,(E/CN.6/2002/9). Available fromwww.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/46sess.htm#documents.United Nations Division for theAdvancement of Women, Environ-mental Management and the Mitiga-tion of Natural Disasters: A GenderPerspective. Documentation takenfrom the expert group meeting held inAnkara, Turkey (November 2001), andfrom discussions during the 46th ses-sion of the Commission on the Statusof Women (4-15 and 25 March 2002),including panel discussions, papers andsummaries. Documents are availablefrom www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/46sess.htm. Astrid Von Kotze and Ailsa Holloway,Reducing Risk: Participatory LearningActivities for Disaster Mitigation inSouthern Africa (Cape Town, Universityof Natal, 1996).

Bridget Walker, ed., “Women andEmergencies”, Focus on Gender, vol.2, No. 1 (London, Oxfam, 1994). Raymond Wiest, Jane Mocellin and D.Thandiwe Motsisi, The Needs ofWomen in Disasters and Emergencies,report prepared for the UNDP(Winnipeg, the University of ManitobaDisaster Research Institute, 1994).Available from www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn.

Related Web Sites

GDN: Gender and Disaster Networkweb site including downloadablepapers and conference proceedings,bibliography and contact information formembers (www.anglia.ac.uk/geogra-phy/gdn)CRID: The Regional DisasterInformation Centre maintains an inter-national collection of Spanish- andEnglish-language documents, with agrowing collection of gender and dis-aster writing (www.crid.or.cr/)DAW: Web site of the United NationsDivision for the Advancement ofWomen (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw)


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Endnotes

1 Statement contributed to Internet conference,cited in Elaine Enarson, Gender Equality, Environ-mental Management and Natural Disaster Reduc-tion. Results of the Online Discussion on GenderEquality, Environmental Management and NaturalDisaster Mitigation from the online conferenceconducted by the United Nations Division for theAdvancement of Women (DAW) in preparationfor the expert group meeting on environmentalmanagement and the mitigation of natural disas-ters: a gender perspective, Ankara, Turkey (No-vember 2001). Available through the DAW(www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/env_manage/documents.html).2 Sávano Briceño, Gender Mainstreaming inDisaster Reduction, statement for the UnitedNations Commission for the Status of Women(46th session, 2001) panel discussion on “Envi-ronmental management and mitigation of naturaldisasters: a gender perspective”. Availablethrough DAW (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw46/panel-briceno.pdf).3 Intermediate Technology Group, “Zimbabwe—beating the drought”, in Living With Disaster,John Twigg, ed. (Rugby, United Kingdom,Intermediate Technology, 1998), pp. 7-9.4 See the ISDR Information Kit (www.unisdr.org/unisdr/camp2001.htm); International Federationof Red Cross and Red Crescent’s annual WorldDisaster Report (www.cred.be/emdat/intro.html);and the database maintained by the Centre forResearch on the Epidemiology of Disasters inBelgium (www.cred.be). Two United Nationspublications provide useful introductions. SeeDisasters: Acts of Nature, Acts of Man? andDisasters and Development (Series No. 4 andNo. 5) from DHA Issues in Focus.5 Janet Abramovitz, “Averting unnaturaldisasters”, State of the World 2001 (WorldwatchInstitute, New York, W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 127.6 Dennis Mileti, Disasters by Design: A Rea-ssessment of Natural Hazards in the UnitedStates (Washington, D.C., John Henry Press,1999). 7 Astrid von Kotze, “A new concept of risk?”,in Risk, Sustainable Development and Disasters,Ailsa Holloway, ed. (Cape Town, South Africa,Periperi Publications, 1999), p. 36. Disaster socialscientists debate the concept in What is a

Disaster?: Perspectives on the Question, E. Quarantelli, ed. (New York, Routledge, 1998).8 Andrew Maskrey, Disaster Mitigation: A Community Based Approach. (Oxford, Oxfam,1989), p. 3.9 Justine Sass, Women, Men, and Environ-mental Change: The Gender Dimensions ofEnvironmental Policies and Programmes (Popu-lation Reference Bureau, 2002), p. 3, availableonline (www.prb.org).10 See Mahjabeen Chowdhury, “Women’stechnological innovations and adaptations fordisaster mitigation: a case study of charlandsin Bangladesh”. Prepared for the Expert GroupMeeting in Ankara, 2001.11 Cited in WEDO Primer: Women and Sus-tainable Development, Local Agenda, May 2001(www.wedo.org/sus_dev/sectrion3.htm). 12 See Helen Cox, “Women in bushfire terri-tory”, in The Gendered Terrain of Disaster:Through Women’s Eyes, Elaine Enarson andBetty Hearn Morrow, eds. (Westport, Green-wood, 1998). 13 See SEWA and DMI web sites for more infor-mation. UNDP’s work is reported in pressrelease No. 209, 21 April 2001(www.undp.org.in/news/press/press209.htm).14 Cited in the IDNDR Fact Sheet (No. 1),“Prevention pays: success stories featuringwomen and children” (1995). 15 See Monica Trujillo, “Garden farming and foodsecurity”, Oxfam newsletter on gender (October1997), p. 3. For gender-sensitive materials onhome gardening and food security, see the FAOweb site (www.fao.org/news/2001/brief/BR0106-e.htm#garden).16 A group of non-governmental organizationsworking worldwide to fight poverty and injustice.17 Interview with K. Pushpanath, Oxfam RegionalRepresentative for Malawi and Zambia, 1988-1993, Focus on Gender, vol. 12, No. 1 (1994).18 John Vidal, “Women power halts work onIndian dam”, Guardian Weekly (18 January 1998),p. 4. Also see Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living(New York, Modern Library, 1999).19 Wilfred Tichigawa, “The effects of drought on the condition of women”, in “Women andEmergencies”, Focus on Gender, Bridget Walker,ed., vol. 2, No. 1 (London, Oxfam, 1994), p. 25.


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20 In the United States, for example, the FederalEmergency Management Agency developedProject Impact to showcase communitiesimplementing the agency’s new focus onmitigation (www.fema.gov/impact). 21 Women’s Environment and DevelopmentOrganization, Addendum No. 1, Dialogue Paperby Women. Prepared for the World Summit onSustainable Development, January 2002 (www.wedo.org/sus_dev/unpaper.htm).22 Adapted from Elaine Enarson, proposal to the Center for Disaster Management andHumanitarian Relief (Tampa, FL, University ofSouth Florida, 2001). Guidelines will be availableonline through the Gender and Disaster Network(www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn). 23 Astrid von Kotze and Ailsa Holloway, ReducingRisk: Participatory Learning Activities for DisasterMitigation in Southern Africa. (Cape Town, SouthAfrica, IFRC and the Department of Adult andCommunity Education, University of Natal, 1996).24 Soroptimist International, “Disasters: thewoman’s perspective”, p. 6 (www.sorop.org).25 See posting by Cathy Diehl in Elaine Enarson,op. cit., report from the online conferenceconducted by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (November 2001)(www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/env_manage/index.html), p. 5.26 The case for gender-balanced emergencymanagement is evident in many accounts.Among others, see Doone Robertson, “Womenin emergency management: an Australianperspective, in Enarson and Morrow. eds., op. cit. (1998); Rashed Begum, “Women in environmental disasters: the 1991 cyclone inBangladesh”, Focus on Gender, vol. 1, No. 1,(1993); and Carolyn Oxlee, Beyond the Veil:Women in Islamic National Societies (mvmt.ifrc.org/magazine/en_2000_1/pages/voile_en.html).27 Cited in IDNDR Fact Sheet (No. 1), op. cit. 28 See posting by Cheryl Anderson cited inElaine Enarson, op. cit., report from the onlineconference conducted by the United NationsDivision for the Advancement of Women(November 2001), p. 12.29 From Mirvat Shabanah, Women Health andDevelopment Office of the WHO, Cairo.Personal communication, EGM, Ankara, 2001. 30 Adapted from Mayra Buvinic, Hurricane Mitch: Women’s Needs and Contributions, Inter-

American Development Bank, SustainableDevelopment Department, Technical PapersSeries, (1999).31 See Alice Fothergill, “The Gendered Terrain of Disaster”, in Enarson and Morrow, eds., op.cit., (1998).32 For examples from Canada and the UnitedStates, see Lynn Orstad, “Tools for change:emergency management for women”, paperprepared for the EGM in Ankara, 2001; andElaine Enarson, “What women do: genderedlabor in the Red River Valley flood”, Environ-mental Hazards, vol. 3, pp. 1-18. 33 For example, a relief worker in India trying toensure that four “untouchable” families in onevillage hit in the 2001 Gujarat earthquakereceived their share of supplies reportedly“struck a deal with the village elders to let amember of a local women’s development groupsupervise the handing out of blankets, tarps andwater bottles”. “Quake can’t shake castesystem”, The Indian Express, 9 February 2001.34 Adapted from Redesigning Reconstruction(April 2001), publication of the Swayam ShikshanPrayog, and from Prema Gopalan, “Responding to earthquakes: people’s participation inreconstruction and rehabilitation”, paper preparedfor the expert group meeting organized by theUnited Nations Division for the Advancement ofWomen, op. cit.35 Described by Lourdes Meyreles, FacultadLatinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO)in the Dominican Republic, at the 2000 Miamiconference, Reaching Women and Children inDisasters. 36 As reported online 25 March 1999 in “Women’sreconstruction brigade to Nicaragua”, posted bythe Central America Women’s Network([email protected]).37 The SEWA web site (www.sewa.org)describes members’ activities during and afterthe earthquake as well as their droughtmitigation projects. 38 “These unsung heroines belief in self-help”,Times of India, 8 March 2001, p. 5.39 See UNDP press release 209(www.undp.org.in/news/press/press209.htm).40 The international network of grassrootswomen’s organizations is a case in point(www.groots.org).


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41 See Elaine Enarson and Betty Hearn Morrow,“Women will rebuild Miami: a case study offeminist response to disaster”, in Enarson andMorrow, eds., op. cit., (1998). 42 See posting by Sarah Henshaw, in ElaineEnarson, op. cit., report from the onlineconference conducted by the United NationsDivision for the Advancement of Women(November 2001), p. 4. Available through theDAW (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/env_manage/documents.html).43 Adapted from “Unsung heroines: women and natural disasters”, USAID Gender MattersInformation Bulletin, No. 8 (January 2000). 44 Carolina Serrat Vinas, “Women’s disastervulnerability and response to the Colima earth-quake”, Enarson and Morrow, eds., op. cit.,(1998).45 Gloria Noel, “The role of women in healthrelated aspects of emergency management”,Enarson and Morrow, eds., op. cit., (1998).46 See Richard Krajeski and Kristina Peterson,“But she is a woman and this is a man’s job:lessons for participatory research and partici-patory recovery”, International Journal of MassEmergencies and Disasters, vol. 17, No. 1(1999).47 Patricia Delaney and Elizabeth Shrader,“Gender and post-disaster reconstruction: the case of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras andNicaragua”, op. cit., (2001). 48 See posting by Madhavi Ariyabandu, in Elaine Enarson, op. cit., report from the onlineconference conducted by the United NationsDivision for the Advancement of Women(November 2001), p. 14. Available through theDAW (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/env_manage/documents.html). There is a great needfor comparative and longitudinal research toidentify factors supporting sustained changetoward more egalitarian gender relations in thewake of disasters. 49 Patricia Delaney and Elizabeth Shrader, Gender and Post-disaster Reconstruction: the Case of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras andNicaragua (Washington, D.C., World Bank, 2001).Available from www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/gdn. 50 Farzani Bari Gender, “Disaster and empower-ment: a case study from Pakistan”, Enarson and

Morrow, eds., op.cit., (1998), p. 131.51 Elaine Enarson and Betty Hearn Morrow,“Women will rebuild Miami”, op. cit. 52 From Armine Mikayelyan, “Earthquake mitiga-tion from a gender perspective in Armenia”,paper prepared for the expert group meetingorganized by the United Nations DAW, op. cit. 53 Described by Hanna Schmuck in “Empoweringwomen in Bangladesh,” uploaded by ReliefWebon 25 February 2002 (www.reliefweb.int). 54 In the United States, see Elaine Enarson andBetty Hearn Morrow, “A gendered perspective:the voices of women”, in Hurricane Andrew:Race, Gender and the Sociology of Disaster,Walter Gillis Peacock and others, eds., (London,Routledge, 1997), pp.116-140; and Elaine Enarson,“What women do”, op. cit. For India, see PremaGopalan, “Responding to earthquakes”, op. cit.;and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, “Gender issues indisaster management: the Latur earthquake”,Gender, Technology and Development, vol. 1, No. 3 (1997). For Turkey, see Sengül Akçar,“Grassroots women’s collectives’ roles in post-disaster efforts”, paper prepared for the expertgroup meeting organized by United Nations DAW,op. cit. The SEWA web site (www.sewa.org)provides additional examples.55 Adapted from Judith Soares and A. Mullings,“As we run tings’: women rebuilding Mont-serrat”, in A Will to Survive: Volcanic impact and Crisis Mitigation in Montserrat, G. D. Howeand Howard Fergus, eds., (Jamaica, University of the West Indies Press, forthcoming).56 Carol Johnson, “When the earth trembled in Mexico. Quake exposes women’s work con-ditions”, New Directions for Women, vol. 15,No. 2, (1986), pp. 1 and 18.57 Sengül Akçar, “Grassroots women’s col-lectives’ roles in postdisaster efforts”, op. cit. 58 As reported in the summary by Fayiza Abbasof remarks by Jan Peterson, Huairou Com-mission on “Women, homes, and community”during the DAW Roundtable on The Dispropor-tionate Impact of Natural Disasters on Women,17 January 2002. 59 Reported by the Huairou Commission(“Findings from the Gujarat Disaster Watch”). 60 See UNDP press release 209 (www.undp.org.in/news/press/press209.htm). The network of

350 Brazilian women’s radio programmes is des-cribed in the WEDO Primer: Women and Sus-tainable Development, Local Agenda, May 2001.61 ECOSOC resolution 2002/5, Part B, para. 7,CSW recommendations address Governments atall levels, international organizations, includingthe United Nations system, donors, with theassistance of NGOs and other actors in civilsociety and the private sectors, as appropriate.62 Beijing Platform for Action, para. 246, BeijingDeclaration and Platform for Action with theBeijing+5 Political Declaration and outcomedocument, (New York, Department of PublicInformation, United Nations, 2001), pp. 137-138.63 Beijing Platform for Action, para. 251, op. cit.,p. 140.

64 Report of the World Summit on SustainableDevelopment, Johannesburg, South Africa, 26 August–4 September 2002 (United Nationspublication, Sales No. E.03.II.A.1).65 The text of the decision can be found atwww.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/csd11/csd11res.pdf.66 The conclusions and recommendations are adapted from Carolyn Hannan, Director,United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, statement at a round-table panel and discussion organized by the Division for the Advancement of Women and the NGO Com-mittee on the Status of Women, United NationsHeadquarters, 17 January 2002 (www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/documents/Natdisas).


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The cover design isadapted from “Tree oflife”, 1999, by EdwinaSandys.

This issue of Women2000 and Beyondwas compiled by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women,

with Ms. Elaine Enarson, Consultant.


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Women Go Global CD-ROMThe United Nations and the International Women’s Movement, 1945-2000

An easy-to-use, interactive, multimedia CD-ROM on the events that have been shaping the international agenda for women’s equalityfrom the inception of the United Nations in 1945, to the year 2000. It offers women’s groups, non-governmental organizations, educa-tors, journalists and governments a compelling history of the struggle for gender equality through the United Nations.

Women Go Global describes milestones in the efforts of the United Nations and the international women’s movement to bring aboutgreater gender equality.

It offers extensive coverage of the four United Nations women’s conferences held in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi(1985) and Beijing (1995) and the parallel non-governmental forums. It discusses the important role of the UN Commission on the Statusof Women and provides up-to-date information on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and on the outcome of Beijing+5.

This unique CD-ROM will allow you to:• Listen to Eleanor Roosevelt reading a Letter to the Women of the World at the first UN General Assembly in 1946• Meet women who served as architects of the women’s movement at the UN• Learn how the UN has become a place for women to lobby and network• Make a virtual journey to the four global women’s conferences and witness the excitement of the parallel activities organized by

the NGOs• Obtain final results of Beijing+5 and learn first-hand about women’s visions for the twenty-first century

Also included is a selective bibliography and hyperlinks to key web sites, such as “Womenwatch”, the UN Internet Gateway onwomen’s issues, as well as a list of country-based archives on women’s history and the profiles of more than 200 key persons parti-cipating in the global effort.

Sales No. E.01.IV.1 • ISBN 92-1-130211-0 • Price: $19.95

Women, Peace and Security: Study submitted by the Secretary-General pursuant to Security Council resolution 1325 (2000)

This study on women, peace and security was mandated by Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) and the preparation was coordi-nated by the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women in close cooperation with the Inter-agency Task Force onWomen, Peace and Security. It indicates that while women and girls share experiences with men and boys during armed conflict, theculture of violence and discrimination against women and girls that exists during peace times is often exacerbated during conflict andnegatively affects women’s ability to participate in peace processes and ultimately inhibits the attainment of lasting peace.

The study documents how, over the last 15 years, the UN system, Member States, regional organizations and civil society increasedefforts to better respond to the differential impact of armed conflict on women and girls and recognized women’s efforts in conflictprevention and conflict resolution. The study recommends the systematic integration of gender perspectives in all peace accords andmandates of peacekeeping and peace-building missions as well as in the programming and delivery of humanitarian assistance; repre-sentation of women at all stages and at all levels of peace operations, in humanitarian operations and in decision-making processes inpost-conflict reconstruction; as well as improved compliance with existing international legal norms.

The study draws on the collective experience of the UN system: it analyses the impact of armed conflict on women and girls; itdescribes the relevant international legal framework; and it reviews the gender perspectives in peace processes, peace operations,humanitarian operations, reconstruction and rehabilitation, and in disarmament, demobilization and the reintegration processes.

Sales No. E.03.IV.1 • ISBN: 92-1-130222-6 • Price: $25.00

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Handbook for Parliamentarians The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

and its Optional ProtocolThis Handbook, produced by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women in collaboration with the Inter-ParliamentaryUnion, offers a comprehensive and educational presentation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination againstWomen and its Optional Protocol. The Handbook presents the background to and content of the Convention and the Optional Protocoland describes the role of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which secures implementation at thenational level. It provides examples of good practice and gives an overview of what parliamentarians can do to ensure effective imple-mentation of the Convention and encourage use of the Optional Protocol. It also proposes model instruments and reference materialas aids designed to facilitate the work of legislators.

The Handbook is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Sales No. E.03.IV.5 • ISBN 92-1-130226-9 • Price $18.95

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United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW)Internet information resources

To access the information available at the DAW Internet databases, follow the instructions listed below:

To access DAW’s web site, go to: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw

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About DAW: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/daw

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Country information: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/country

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