by Tyler Fallon
Four days after Hurricane Sandy (the largest Atlantic hurricane on record) devastated the North East United States, not to mention other places, I would like to take some times to examine how women are uniquely affected by natural disasters. And make no mistake, there are differences. A fact sheet published by Pan American Health Organization outlines some of the major problems:
- Women have less access to resources- social networks and influence, transportation, information, skills (including literacy), control over land and other economic resources, personal mobility, secure housing and employment, freedom from violence and control over decision-making – that are essential in disaster preparedness, mitigation and rehabilitation.
- Women are victims of the gendered division of labour. They are over-represented in the agriculture industry, self-employment and the informal economy, in under-paid jobs with little security and no benefits such as healthcare or union representation. The informal and agricultural sectors are usually the most impacted by natural disasters, thus women become over-represented among the unemployed following a disaster.
- Women are more likely to have taken on the role of caretaker, and therefore often lack the ability to migrate after a natural disaster.
Women are also more likely to be the victim of sexual violence, as we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Not all news is bad, though: often in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, there is a “tyranny of the urgent” and traditional gender roles are often overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant. The unique opportunity to change traditional gender roles that a disaster situation awards is wasted if women do not take advantage of it, or if decision-makers ignore it. We saw this in the after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, hurricane Mitch in 1998, and more recently during the BP oil spill.
So while women are definitely worse off than men during and after a natural disaster, there is also the unique chance to enact social change- but it requires social literacy and participation by all involved parties in order to be utilized.