Disasters Are Gendered: What’s New? - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 270

hampered by an apparent unwillingness to name, in similarly uncompromising
language, the processes of misogyny and patriarchy that systematically put
women at a disadvantage.
This also opens the door to an intriguing conversation about the role that the
practicalities of DRR might unobtrusively play in challenging deep-rooted patri-
archal privilege without making that the leading goal. Teaching women to swim,
for example, might be a smart DRR strategy as well as a highly transformative
action. The gender empowerment revolution starts, perhaps, in the nearest body
of water.
2. DRR policymakers, disaster experts, government offi cials, and disaster relief
NGOs need to stop talking about “households.” They must stop using the house-
hold as the primary metric for data collection. There can be no effective DRR or
early warning system developed on the basis of the household. “Households”
don't have income, or literacy, or access to technology. “Households” don't, as
an undifferentiated entity, experience disasters.
3. The United Nations, through the Hyogo Secretariat, should develop mechanisms
to hold governments accountable to the gender commitments they agreed to in
the Hyogo Framework. Add carrots - or sticks - to ensure compliance with those
gender commitments. Rhetorical commitments in this, as in other enterprises
(e.g., see Seager 2010b ) are necessary but far from suffi cient.
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