Which leads to the second point: the data we already have makes it abundantly clear that female politicians are not operating on a level playing field. The system is skewed towards electing men, which means that the system is skewed towards perpetuating the gender data gap in global leadership, with all the attendant negative repercussions for half the world’s population. We have to stop wilfully closing our eyes to the positive discrimination that currently works in favour of men. We have to stop acting as if theoretical, legal equality of opportunity is the same as true equality of opportunity. And we have to implement an evidence-based electoral system that is designed to ensure that a diverse group of people is in the room when it comes to deciding on the laws that govern us all.
PART VI
When it Goes Wrong
CHAPTER 15
Who Will Rebuild?
When Hillary Clinton wanted to speak about women’s rights at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, even her own side was dubious.1 ‘People were saying: “This is a not an important issue for the US government, it’s a nice thing and I’m glad you care about it, but if the First Lady of the United States goes and actually speaks about women’s rights, that elevates an issue that in the midst of everything else going on – the collapse of the USSR and the transition of the former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact nations and Rwanda and Bosnia, there was so much else going on in the world – maybe you should speak about it from afar.”’ As we will see (and as the US administration already knew at the time) what was ‘going on’ in Rwanda and Bosnia was the mass and systematic rape of women.
When things go wrong – war, natural disaster, pandemic – all the usual data gaps we have seen everywhere from urban planning to medical care are magnified and multiplied. But it’s more insidious than the usual problem of simply forgetting to include women. Because if we are reticent to include women’s perspectives and address women’s needs when things are going well, there’s something about the context of disaster, of chaos, of social breakdown, that makes old prejudices seem more justified. And we’re always ready with an excuse. We need to focus on rebuilding the economy (as we’ve seen, this is based on a false premise). We need to focus on saving lives (as we will see this is also based on false premise). But the truth is, these excuses won’t wash. The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest.
The failure to include women in post-disaster efforts can end in farce. ‘They built houses without any kitchens,’ Maureen Fordham, a professor of disaster resilience, tells me. It was 2001, and an earthquake had just hit Gujarat, a state in western India. Thousands of people died and nearly 400,000 homes were destroyed. So new homes were needed, but Gujarat’s rebuilding project had a major data gap: women weren’t included or even consulted in the planning process. Hence the kitchenless homes. In some confusion I ask Fordham how people were expected to cook. ‘Well, quite,’ she replies, adding that the homes were also often missing ‘a separate area that’s usually attached to a house where the animals are kept’, because animal care isn’t on the whole a male responsibility. ‘That’s women’s work.’
If this sounds like an extreme one-off, it isn’t. The same thing happened in Sri Lanka four years later.2 It was after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which swept across the coasts of fourteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing a quarter of a million people in its wake. And just like in Gujarat, Sri Lanka’s rebuilding programme didn’t include women, and, as a result, they built homes without kitchens. A related issue arises in refugee camps when humanitarian agencies distribute food that must be cooked – but forget to provide cooking fuel.3
The US has a similar history of forgetting about women in post-disaster relief efforts. Fordham tells me about the redevelopment scheme set up in Miami following 1992’s Hurricane Andrew. ‘They called it “We Will Rebuild”.’ The problem was, the ‘we’ who were planning the rebuilding were nearly all men: of the fifty-six people on the decision-making board (reportedly an ‘invitation-only group of Miami insiders’4) only eleven were women.
This male-dominated ‘we’ were criticised at the time as ‘an uptown group trying to deal with a downtown problem’. One woman simply saw ‘the good ole boy network once more taking charge, running things when they had no real idea of what the problems were, especially the problems of women. It was business as usual.’ And what this good ole boy network wanted to rebuild was business centres, the skyscrapers, the Chamber of Commerce facility, at a time when ‘thousands were still suffering from [a] lack of basic necessities [and] community services’. They completely missed, says Fordham, ‘things like nursery schools or health centres’, as well as the smaller-scale informal workplaces, which, as we’ve seen, are particularly relevant to women’s needs. In Miami, disgruntled women’s rights activists set up ‘Women Will Rebuild’ to address the gaps in the official scheme.
We Will Rebuild was a while ago now, but when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans thirteen years later, it became clear that lessons had not been learned. Over 30,000 people were displaced by the August 2005 hurricane (at the time, the US was in the top ten of countries with ‘major internally displaced populations
