Disasters Are Gendered: What’s New? - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 256

Chapter 14
Disasters Are Gendered: What's New?
Joni Seager
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 fi ndings 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 fi ndings. 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, unfi n-
ished 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.
Keywords Gender ￿ Hyogo Framework ￿ Disaster risk reduction ￿ Disaster early
warning ￿ Patriarchy ￿ Violence against women ￿ Gender inequality