Gender Dimensions of Disaster Risk Resilience
Gender inequalities can result in gender-differentiated disaster impact, which in turn affect future resilience to shocks.
Men and women, boys and girls have different experiences of disasters. Gender dynamics impact both the way they are affected by disasters and their capacity to withstand and recover from them. Gender inequalities can result in gender-differentiated disaster impact, and differentiated impacts can influence gender dynamics, which in turn affect future resilience to shocks.
Disaster risk management policies are designed to maximize results, taking local conditions — including gender dynamics — as fixed. When women and men are affected differently by disasters, practitioners and policy makers have a responsibility to use the tools available for mitigating disaster impacts to close gender gaps in outcome. An improved understanding of the gender dynamics of disaster risk and resilience also allows for better policy and program design, which benefits all stakeholders.
Debunking myths and stereotypes, and uncovering the underlying drivers of gendered outcomes, are important components of that effort. Recognizing that there are multiple vectors of vulnerability and exclusion, calling for more contextualized and nuanced analysis is also vital. This is what this report, Gender Dimensions of Disaster Risk and Resilience—Existing Evidence, seeks to achieve.
This report reviews existing evidence and data on how men and women, boys and girls are impacted by, prepare for and cope with disasters. It is not about depicting women and girls as perpetually worse-off victims of disasters; rather, it is about recognizing that men and women, boys and girls are affected in different ways. The report objectives are to:
- Identify gender gaps in disaster outcomes and resilience — and the underlying drivers of those gaps — to create better policies and programs
- Identify the most important knowledge and data gaps, which will guide the next steps for analytics in this space
- Offer an operationally useful framework that can be used for local assessments of gender dynamics in disaster risk and resilience
Gender resilience conceptual framework
The paper presents a non-linear framework for considering the role of gender in disaster risk and resilience. The framework is a simple representation of a complex reality. Disaster impacts (orange circle) depend on hazard type and intensity, who and what is exposed, levels of vulnerability and preparedness and coping capacity. Floods, droughts, earthquakes and other natural hazards are gender neutral. Gender inequality (purple circle) arises from the expected roles of men and women in a society, which influence socioeconomic status, level of agency, and the way men and women prepare for, react to, are impacted by and recover from, disasters. In the overlay (maroon area) between gender inequality and disaster impacts are the factors that drive disaster impacts and are influenced by gender dynamics.
It is in the overlay maroon area where gender-differentiated impacts of disaster are generated. These, in turn, can exacerbate gender inequality by influencing the prevailing socioeconomic conditions that determine gender equality. For example, when, due to a lack of access to bank accounts, women hold a larger share of their assets in tangible form than men, they are at greater risk of losing their assets to disasters, which would worsen gender inequality. Gender-differentiated impacts also influence resilience to future disasters.
Disaster risk management policies and interventions should operate in the overlay maroon area. This means good disaster risk management should consider ways in which gender dynamics influence disaster impacts in any given area before making decisions on policy or project design, to be able to mitigate gendered differences in disaster outcomes and maximize benefits for all. The findings of this review are organized around this framework. Three obvious facts underscore the guiding principles of this report:
- Disasters encompass a wide range of hazards.
- Women are highly diverse group.
- Gender is not just about women: it is about the relations between males and females.
Disaster impacts: exposure and vulnerability
Natural hazards are gender neutral; but the impacts are not. Men and women, boys and girls face different levels of exposure and vulnerability to natural hazards, driven by gender relations and discrimination in society. This results in differentiated impacts on endowments (health, education, assets); economic outcomes (employment, assets, wages, consumption); and voice and agency (child marriage, gender-based violence, women as agents of change). Women are disproportionately affected by disasters in several outcomes, including life expectancy, unemployment, labor force re-entry and relative asset losses. Gender-based violence — a manifestation of systematic inequality between men and women — is exacerbated at times of emergency.
While women and girls are in a disadvantaged position in society at large, this does not by default translate into worse disaster outcomes. A common belief is that women are more likely to die during a disaster. Yet, men account for 70 percent of flood-related deaths in Europe and the United States. This is driven by several reasons, including an overrepresentation of men in rescue professions. In less developed countries, more women tend to die from disasters. Although men are also overrepresented in risky and rescue professions in these countries, gender gaps in access to information on disaster preparedness, access to public shelters and limits to mobility seem to contribute more to gendered mortality outcomes, putting women at a disadvantage.
Boys and girls are affected differently by disasters. For health outcomes, boys are disadvantaged when affected in utero or early life due to biological factors. However, the preferred treatment of boys means that girls are worse off when their families face scarcity due to disaster and families are more likely to take their daughters out of school if they cannot pay tuition or the domestic burden increases after a disaster. On the other hand, if labor needs increase — for example, in agriculture — boys are more likely to be taken out of school. Disaster impacts on education are also reflected in child marriage and labor rates.
Economically, disasters have different effects for men and women, with women largely disadvantaged. In developing countries, agriculture is the most important economic sector for female employment; and women farmers tend to be more vulnerable to disasters than male farmers. The domestic burden also tends to increase after a disaster, and women usually bear the brunt of this, at the cost of missing out on other income-generating activities. Their lack of access to bank accounts also means that women’s assets are less protected than men’s.
Gender-based violence is exacerbated in post-disaster situations. Domestic violence rates also tend to increase in slow-onset disasters, such as droughts.
Finally, women are important agents of change and their involvement and leadership in decision making when it comes to disaster planning, response and reconstruction is crucial for making sure that disasters do not disadvantage women or girls.
Resilience: preparedness and coping capacity
Gender dynamics play a role in a wide range of factors associated with resilience, from preparedness levels to access to coping mechanisms that can support recovery.
Women tend to perceive risks more saliently than men, but there is no clear evidence that this translates into greater preparedness action. When it comes to evacuation behavior, access to early warning and safe shelter options are important determinants. In developing countries, women have lower access to information and communication technologies, which could influence their access to relevant information in post-disaster situations. In many cases, lack of access to safe shelter is also an issue, often deterring women from evacuating.
Individual and household disaster recovery is driven by access to coping mechanisms — including finance and savings, assets, government support, livelihoods and the ability to switch income sources in the aftermath of a disaster — or adaptation through migration.
Lower access to bank accounts, formal sources of finance and stable income impacts women’s ability to cope and recover in the aftermath of a disaster. While microlending and informal finance can promote recovery, overreliance on these options can make women particularly vulnerable to disasters. Further, in places where women keep their assets in high-value, tradable goods, their assets are more likely to be sold in times of hardship, potentially helping the family recover, but also reducing their wealth.
The post-disaster coping mechanism adopted also affects gender equality. For example, male out-migration can have positive implications for women’s voice and agency by transforming household power dynamics.
Data gaps in disaster risk management
To understand the underlying gender dynamics of disaster risk and design appropriate policies, the first step is ensuring data collection is disaggregated by sex and age. Disaster risk management lags behind other sectors in collecting and reporting of sex- and age disaggregated data (SADD). Three priorities are:
- Making sure SADD is available for casualties and affected populations.
- Collecting more information on damages and losses at the individual, rather than household, level.
- Improving access to information on people with disabilities or from racial, ethnic or religious minorities.
Key messages for policymaking
Policies that take gender dynamics into account will mitigate disaster impacts more efficiently without exacerbating existing gender gaps. The full report recommends a set of policy actions in exposure, vulnerability, preparedness and coping capacity for use before, during and after a disaster to mitigate differentiated impacts for men and women, boys and girls. These policies are indicative, and do not replace the need for a local gender gap assessment before deciding on policy action. Their key messages are:
- Identifying a gender gap in disaster outcomes — for example, in mortality — but not what drives them is a lost opportunity for creating effective policies and interventions.
- Community involvement is key to channeling preparedness and early warning information, and women’s participation in this process is crucial.
- Increasing female representation in disaster risk management and civil protection agencies helps legitimize and support women’s contributions to disaster risk reduction and resilience.
- Social protection is an increasingly important policy for addressing disaster vulnerability and can be carefully used to mitigate gender-differentiated disaster impacts.
- Disaster reconstruction is an opportunity to build back in a way that breaks down the constraints faced by women.
- Undertaking a local assessment helps identify gaps and barriers that make natural disasters particularly harmful for certain populations before policy agendas are set.
Analytical and operational priorities
Next steps for this work can be organized around both analytical and operational priorities.
Analytical priorities include closing important knowledge and data gaps. Specifically, this involves:
- Moving beyond anecdotal evidence when relevant and possible by leveraging existing global and regional data to scale up case studies.
- Understanding what does and does not work for different population groups by investing more in rigorous impact evaluations of disaster risk management and resilience building projects and interventions.
- Leveraging new data and technologies — such as mobility data — to explore topics, previously understudied, including gendered evacuation patterns and behaviors.
From an operational perspective, resources and guidance on how to conduct gender gap assessments in disaster risk management will be needed at the country and project level. While this report can inform the design of gender gap assessments by providing a useful conceptual framework, relevant literature and data sources, it cannot replace the need for local assessments. Agreeing on a common framework for local assessment will help achieve consistency in disaster risk management gender gap assessments.