GENDER EQUALITY, WORK, AND DISASTER REDUCTION:
MAKING THE CONNECTIONS
Elaine Enarson
Introduction[1]
Media accounts of disasters which relentlessly portray women beseeching help—their homes crumbled around them, belongings scattered, family members injured or dead—reinforce the victim paradigm which so discredits people’s resilience in emergencies. These images particularly distort the complex and resourceful ways in which women respond to extreme environmental events. This chapter is written to redress the balance, drawing attention to factors magnifying the impacts of natural disasters on women and their work and to strategies for capitalizing on these events as windows of opportunity for social change. How women’s and men’s lives and livelihoods are intertwined before, during, and after natural disasters is not a sidebar to the main story but a central part of the social experience of disasters and key to their prevention. It follows that just and effective disaster interventions must be fine-tuned to reflect the context-specific and embodied social worlds of women and men.
I draw on case studies from around the world to make the case, beginning with a brief discussion of disasters as products not of nature but of human choices about global development. Then I offer an overview of the root causes of gendered vulnerability. Because gender inequities put women especially at risk, most of the subsequent discussion focuses on how disasters impact women’s work. Here I focus on why and how women lose income, how disasters undermine women’s social protection and increase their risk, the expansion of women’s domestic labor in disasters, and new forms of work undertaken by women in disaster contexts. I follow up with a speculative discussion about change, suggesting the need to prioritize women’s economic recovery from disasters, use action research to learn from women’s and men’s disaster experiences, and help organizations move toward gender-fair practices reducing vulnerability. These strategies reflect the emerging view of disasters as unresolved problems of global development and opportunities for building more just, sustainable, and disaster-resilient communities. In my view, the International Labour Organization is uniquely positioned to address economic issues arising in natural disasters from a gendered perspective. Its historic mission to promote decent work and social justice, its tripartite structure, and its leadership capacity and expertise lend comparative advantage at a time when disaster reduction, and not disaster relief, is essential. For these reasons I highlight the work of the ILO.
Disasters By Design
Tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, earthquakes and floods may be predictable, even routine, events but their social, political, and economic effects are neither inevitable nor “natural.” Instead, we might speak of “disasters by design” because these events become catastrophic largely as a result of political choices made about people and their land.[2] Environmental degradation, climate change, increasing social inequalities, population pressure, hyperurbanization, and economic globalization are powerful global forces increasing the likelihood of destruction after a major earthquake or cyclone; rising technological interdependencies (e.g. in utility systems, financial markets, and electronic telecommunication networks) also make these events more dangerous. A massive earthquake or volcanic eruption simply lays bare the inequalities of social development which place some people more than others in risky living conditions—on steep hillsides, in trailer homes on flood plains, in shantytown dwellings—and undermine their capacity to mitigate, survive, or fully recovery from the effects of catastrophe.
Three times as many natural disasters were reported in the 1990s as in the 1970s. Whether measured by loss of life, damage to property and infrastructure, or indirect effects on national economies, livelihoods, health and well-being, natural disasters are also increasingly costly. Developing nations are most likely to depend on fragile natural resources economically, most impacted economically by the short- and long-term costs of disasters, least able to afford structural mitigation and social insurance protecting people in disasters, and most hard hit by the diversion of funds from development to disaster relief and reconstruction. The great majority of disaster-related injuries and deaths also occur in the least developed nations of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Disaster risk is also differentially distributed within societies.[3] Social vulnerability is a complex concept but sensitizes us to people’s differential access to, and control over, the resources needed to survive and recover from disasters, including control over land, money, credit, and tools; large households with low dependency ratios; good health and personal mobility; household entitlements and food security; secure housing in safe locations; freedom from violence, strong social networks, transportation, time, information, and literacy in dominant languages. While poor people in poor countries are more vulnerable in these terms, disaster vulnerability is not synonymous with poverty. The rich can and do buy their way into harm’s way in luxury beach homes or on steep hillsides subject to wildfire, but they are also more resilient to economic loss. Most people lack control over the forces putting them near a raging Indonesian forest fire or beneath a collapsing “mountain” of urban garbage in Manila. With less social choice and fewer recovery resources, the poor pay with their lives and livelihoods.
In addition to the poor and economically insecure, those most at risk when extreme environmental events occur are subordinated ethnic or racial groups, the frail elderly or disabled, infants and young children, and socially excluded groups like undocumented workers, the homeless, and street children. Often neglected in the list of at-risk groups are women and girls. Across cultures, gender is the basis not only for social divisions of labor but social systems distributing life chances, social power, personal autonomy, political voice—and the capacity to anticipate, survive, and recover from natural disasters.
The gendered terrain of disaster
Researchers have documented persistent differences and inequalities throughout the disaster process. [4] Gender differences are found in studies of mitigation, emergency preparedness, voluntary action, emergency communication, the division of labor in disaster work, post-traumatic stress, and coping strategies, among other areas. Masculinity norms may encourage risky (“heroic”) action during the search and rescue period, debris removal, and reconstruction, and deter men from approaching relief agencies or seeking counseling later. Disaster mortality patterns are also gendered, though inconsistently,[5] and increasing longevity puts more women than men at risk of physical changes limiting their mobility in emergencies. But women’s vulnerability to disasters resides primarily in gender inequality, not gender difference. Women’s inability to enjoy their full human rights; limitations on personal autonomy and political expression; barriers to literacy, education, employment and training; and constraints on women’s health, time and personal security are all factors undermining their ability to anticipate, prepare for, survive, respond to, and recover from disasters. Cultural constraints can cost women’s lives, as was reported following Bangladesh’s devastating 1991 cyclone:[6] [W]omen are deprived of the capacity to cope with disasters by being kept in dependent positions in terms of accessing information from the world outside the bari, and by being denied their right to take major decisions. In this respect, purdah as an institution which prevents women from engaging in socio-economic roles outside the household directly prescribes women’s vulnerability to disaster.
Economic security is a primary factor in social vulnerability. Disasters disrupt commerce and markets, destroy productive resources and infrastructure, and vastly complicate people’s family and work lives. Conversely, secure income, access to savings or credit, employment with social protection, marketable job skills, education and training, and control over productive resources are all assets enabling people in hazard-prone regions to survive interruptions in their income, reduce losses to their homes or businesses, evacuate or relocate if necessary, rebuild homes and businesses, and replace needed work space, tools, livestock, or equipment. Poor women’s ability to earn money every day is an essential survival strategy for families living close to the margin and struggling to cope with successive economic and environmental crises, but they more than others lack access to these key resources.[7] Full discussion of women’s economic status is beyond the scope of this chapter, but as the majority of those who labor in the informal sector, without basic social protections such as child care or insurance, without formal representation or sustained dialogue with employers, and in workplaces which often jeopardize their health, women are at risk long before tidal waves surge or crops lost to drought.
Restoring economic resources and capacities is essential to long-term disaster recovery but simply restoring the status quo ante leaves women highly vulnerable. For example, an Oxfam study of disaster vulnerability observed that prior to hurricane Mitch women in Honduras headed more than one in four households (27%); 72% of these were supported at below-poverty levels (vs. 63 % of all households); after 30 years of conflict, one in ten Guatemalan women is a widow.[8] In Southern Mozambique, one-third of all households were female-headed prior to the devastating spring 2000 floods and patrilineality limited women’s control over land and other key assets in this crisis.[9] The direct and indirect impacts of natural disasters on women’s livelihoods are still poorly understood, in part because their income-generating activities do not mirror those of most men, but knowing what puts women at risk economically in a disaster-prone region is a critical first step to effective mitigation and long-term recovery. Without sustained attention to the impacts of disasters on women and their work, disaster interventions may leave women more, not less, economically vulnerable to the effects of subsequent disasters. How this occurs, and what strategies can work against this, is the subject of this paper.
The Economic Impacts of Disasters on Women’s Work: Case Studies
The cultural fiction of women as homemakers and helpmates to male earners ( “the farmer and his wife”) persists. In fact, women’s daily lives around the world are structured around a complex web of work and responsibilities—to others in the family and community, to the household economy, to employers and, for the poorest women, to the natural environment which supports them.
While rarely conducted with an explicit gender analysis, the case studies cited below demonstrate that women are indeed major economic, social and political actors in the social crisis following from severe environmental events. As we might expect, women already on the margins of survival, who live with the “daily disaster” of poverty before, during, and after these extreme environmental events we call natural disasters, are those most hard hit and least able to recover. But how does this happen?
1. Disasters rob women of income
First and most importantly, natural disasters rob women of income. Most striking are the losses endured by women in lesser developed and resource-dependent countries. Female agricultural laborers are concentrated at the end of the food processing chain. It was no surprise, then, that “women in the agro-processing industry in Honduras (particularly bananas) have yet to return to their jobs while their male counterparts have been employed in construction and rehabilitation activities.”[10] An estimated 3.4% of the entire economically-active female population of Honduras were thrown out of work by this single event.[11] Migrant labor is also disrupted. Women traveling migrant labor circuits lost work when hurricane Andrew destroyed local crops traditionally picked by Mexican migrants and when floods destroyed the North Dakota potato fields worked by migrant workers from Texas.[12]
In the Indian state of Gujarat, where a catastrophic earthquake occurred in the midst of a severe and long-lasting drought, women lost work when the gum trees they tapped were toppled; waged farm workers lost work when local irrigation systems failed; and, paradoxically, women employed as migratory salt farmers lost work when the quake transformed salt water to fresh in some places. Women reported in focus groups conducted a month after the quake that approximately one-third of the field workers and salt farm workers lost work immediately and were still without income.[13] Women lacking land rights or farming small plots are especially vulnerable and may be forced off the land entirely. For example, Wiest’s study of single mothers in Bangladesh rearing children on the least desirable river plain chars found that flooding forced women heading households from bad to worse land and eventually into involuntary low-wage agricultural labor on local plantations.[14]
A gender-sensitive ‘social audit’ of the effects of hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua revealed that women’s employment in income-generating activities declined, especially among wives/partners under the age of 25.[15] In the study of 68 households, the proportion of women who were earners declined from one-half before the hurricane to less than a third . One year after hurricane Mitch, many women in two-earner households had not yet returned to paid work; young wives/partners were especially likely not to have found paid work.This not only reinforced traditional relationships within the household but left more households in the region dependent on a single, male earner—arguably far more vulnerable to future economic crises.[16] Further, as spending on children’s health and nutrition tends to decline when women’s income declines, the capacity of families to survive another year of drought or next year’s flood is reduced.[17]
The direct effects of natural disasters on women’s employment can also be dramatic in urban contexts and in highly developed societies. Women tend to dominate as health care providers, patients, residents, and teachers in such large public facilities as hospitals, nursing homes and schools. When these public-sector buildings are destroyed or damaged, women may be killed in large numbers, disabled through injuries, and/or displaced from their own homes to temporary settlements far from their workplace.
The somewhat less dramatic indirect effects on women’s work may be more costly in the long run. Women are often employed in the tourist industry along stormy coasts or in service and retail industries dependent upon high levels of consumption and disposable incomes which will certainly be constrained by the ripple effects of a flood or cyclone destroying infrastructure, housing, and workplaces. The Gujarat earthquake destroyed the homes of artisans in Kutch but also the extended markets through which their products were sold; street vending families in Ahmedabad, Gujarat were soon unable to obtain the famed Kutch embroidery and faced substantially reduced incomes. Women in maquilas or cottage industries dependent upon export production will lose income when a volcanic eruption or severe quake damages or destroys transportation and communication systems, international commerce, and local markets. Domestic workers serving private homes are hit by secondary unemployment when their employers flee their damaged or destroyed homes, as was observed following hurricane Andrew in Miami. Paradoxically, the provision of no-cost services to disaster victims (e.g. counseling, or temporary child care) can also deprive women in caregiving fields of much-needed income during the recovery period.[18]
From street venders selling homemade foods to home-based service workers and professionals, women regularly lose income when their homes are flooded, toppled, or burned. Losing working space, productive assets, health, and time for income-generating work; they must then spend precious cash or limited credit to make good these losses and buy at market the goods they formerly produced at home. Damage to homes threatens women’s fundamental human right to work by destroying their “only natural capital,” particularly for rural and indigenous women whose home is the primary site over which she exercises some control.[19] A report from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean following earthquakes in El Salvador reported high levels of unemployment (85 percent of urban and 64 percent of rural women) but even greater indirect losses: [20]
Moreover, 94 percent suffered loss of goods directly linked to income generation and goods considered women’s property. In view of the household’s key role in social and economic relations in the community and the high proportion of women with small businesses in their homes, this loss is significant. Damages to home gardening businesses (farming, breeding and fruit and vegetables cropping), an important asset in the subsistence economy, were also high.