Abstract
A vast academic, policy, practitioner, and activist literature, stretching back at least two decades, documents and analyzes the gendered dimensions of “natural” disasters and, more recently, of climate change.
The primary takeaway conclusion from the literally hundreds of studies and reports is a deceptively simple one: disasters are gendered in every aspect, including impacts of the disaster itself and impacts of the social disruption that follows, post-event recovery and reconstruction, policy formulations, and “lessons learned.” This chapter, following a brief review of the core findings in gendered disaster analysis, outlines four areas of research on gender and disasters – disaster vulnerability, post-disaster violence, early warning systems, and policy interventions – emphasizing emerging analyses and new findings. The enormous scale of violence against women associated with natural disasters is just now being acknowledged. Digitally-based systems represent new promise in early warning, but in many parts of the world patriarchal restrictions prevent women from using these technologies. Implementation of the gender commitments in the Hyogo Framework is shown to be lacking.
Almost everywhere in the world, gender-aware disaster policy is, at best, unfinished business; in many places in the world, it is actually “unstarted” business. The chapter concludes with three policy remedies: put patriarchy on the agenda, take “household”-level data and analysis off the agenda, and add real incentives to meet the gender commitments of Hyogo.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.unfpa.org/emergencies/violence.htm; accessed August 1, 2013
- 2.
I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for emphasizing this point.
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Seager, J. (2014). Disasters Are Gendered: What’s New?. In: Singh, A., Zommers, Z. (eds) Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems For Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8598-3_14
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