Gender and Climate Change by Joane Nagel

Twentieth-century gender research made important inroads into understanding the unequal place and treatment of women in societies around the world ( de Beauvoir, 1949/1972 Friedan, 1963 Ortner, 1974). In this Perspective, we ask: what accounts for the conflation of “gender” and “women” in climate change research, and what are the implications of the primary focus on women? One answer to the gender=woman assumption flows from feminist scholarship. In this Perspective, we acknowledge women's relative vulnerability to climate change, outline in some detail the role of men and masculinity in the climate crisis, and identify the unique strengths that women and men each bring to the table to address the environmental challenges facing humanity.Īn Internet search for “gender and climate change” generates almost exclusively links to research on “women and climate change.” The men are missing. Gender researchers' emphasis on women's plight and inequality obscures the exception that proves the rule: men wield the (sometimes) invisible hands that create and perpetuate the climate crisis at the expense of everyone, including women. We find, further, that analysts' gender/women conflation hinders redress of women's injuries by camouflaging men's blameworthiness and offering solutions that often increase women's duties. We note that researchers' focus on women's suffering diverts attention from a thorough examination of the mechanisms and consequences of men's domination of climate change research and policy.

While this assessment is accurate on its face, it leads to solutions that address the problem (women's troubles), not its causes (men's greater responsibilities and failures relating to climate change). In this Perspective, we argue that much climate change research conflates “gender” with “women.” We ask, what are the consequences of this conflation, and what do we learn when we follow sociologist George Homan's classical command to “bring men back in” to our analysis of the gendered dimensions of climate change? We find, first, that scholarship on gender and climate change tends to depict women mainly as victims of the uneven impacts of climate change. Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, United States.

Gender and Climate Change by Joane Nagel