Disasters Are Gendered: What’s New? - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 269

14.5 Moving Forward

So, what, then, are the prospects for moving forward to achieve effective gender-aware
disaster risk reduction and early warning policies and practices? Feminist practitio-
ners, activists, NGO workers, and policymakers have put considerable effort into
developing practices and policies to mitigate the disadvantages that women, almost
universally, experience in disasters (e.g., see Center for International Studies and
Cooperation 2011 ; Oxfam 2008 ; Klein 2010 ; UNISDR 2006 , 2009 ). Some of these
efforts have yielded practical “handbooks,” guidelines, and checklists for gender-
sensitive DRR and recovery in planning and fi eld-based practice, while others focus
on capability-based development practices and theory and explore the importance
of enhancing women's capacities. These efforts have put sustainable development,
equity-based participation, violence prevention, and refugee issues, among others,
on the disaster “agenda.”
I can offer little to improve upon these efforts. Rather, I offer three prescriptive
high-level solutions that point to directions and needs that are not fully explored
elsewhere:

1. Beyond tailoring early warning systems to accommodate gender inequality,
holistic DRR approaches should also attempt to reduce gender inequality. 2 A fi rst
step in that direction would be willingness by policymakers and analysts to
unfl inchingly identify and name the actual social forces that are producing the
inequality we see evidenced in disasters. Feminist analyses of patriarchy and
misogyny are particularly salient to this effort. Patriarchal privilege is at the heart
of most of the disadvantages women face in disasters and in recovering from
them. Misogyny underlies the easy acceptance of violence against women - or,
more casually, the lack of curiosity about such violence. The protection of male
privilege is the essential motivation for withholding literacy, education, and tech-
nology from women and girls. Norms of femininity that prevent women from
developing strong bodies or that keep them confi ned to the home, often in clothing
that hinders their movement, imperils them in the teeth of disaster - that's patri-
archy at work too.
This is not to suggest that outsiders - experts in DRR, for example - should
attempt social engineering in cultures and communities where they have little or
no legitimacy or cultural purchase. Challenges to gender norms and patriarchal
conventions in any community need to be formulated primarily within and by
that community. Nonetheless, DRR experts, NGOs, and policymakers from the
key global institutions involved with disasters can play critical supporting roles
in such community processes.
The fi rst step down that policy path is to make visible and name the real
obstacles and forces that produce such gender-differentiated disaster outcomes.
While “racism” is often named in explaining race-differentiated disaster out-
comes, as it should be, analysis of gender-differentiated outcomes has been

2 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for emphasizing this point.