Do It Like a Woman by Caroline Criado-Perez

Author:Caroline Criado-Perez [Caroline Criado-Perez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Portobello Books
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The exclusion of women from decisions that affect their lives is something that Lučka Kajfež Bogataj encounters in the field of climate change research. ‘Impacts will hit women harder,’ she tells me, ‘but at the same time, when decisions are taken to avoid these impacts, women are not there.’ The result, Lučka says, is that when energy policies are set, in large-scale international negotiations on climate change, women are rarely at the top of the agenda, meaning that many solutions, ‘even if they are simple or doable’, just get missed. It gives the impression that ‘no one cares about half of humanity’.

This impression is reinforced by the media’s handling of climate change, one of the few phenomena on which they are reluctant to accept expert opinion – a dubious distinction which climate change shares with gender issues. Expert opinion on both climate change and sexism is pretty conclusive: they verifiably exist, they are a problem. Yet, rather than accept this basic tenet and debate potential solutions, the media seem determined to host endless reruns of the same ontological debate, pitting experts against non-expert vested interests, with the implication that the ‘opinions’ of both ‘sides’ are equally valid. The fact that the two issues where the media seem to hold the least respect for expert opinion are both deeply gendered is troubling.

Not only will climate change impact on women more than men, Lučka tells me, but the way the impact is divided along gender lines is more dramatic even than the divide between developing and developed countries, or between rich and poor. ‘I will start with water,’ she says, ‘because water is such a clear example. Water and food are always part of women’s everyday work.’ Climate change means ‘less water’, meaning that accessing water, carrying water, ‘will become an extremely difficult job’. It will also affect food stocks, which will particularly affect countries that are dependent on yearly yields. This means more work for women, who make up the majority of rural smallholder farmers (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates this figure at 80%). To give an idea of the scale of small-holder farmers, they are estimated to produce 90% of the food grown in Africa and over 50% of the world’s food. This is not a minority issue.

Extreme weather events and negative economic impacts also tend to affect women more, Lučka says, because of women’s unequal shouldering of the household care burden. Men are better equipped to cope with the adverse economic impacts of climate change, since it is easier to move away from their home, even their country, in order to find work. In extreme weather events, women have been shown to focus not just on saving their own lives, but also those of their children. ‘You can barely take care of yourself,’ Lučka says, ‘but women are expected to take care of the children as well.’

There is also evidence that the negative impact climate change is having on agricultural yields is causing outbreaks of disease, as humans encroach on bat habitats in an effort to find alternative food sources.

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