The reluctance to factor gender into relief efforts is partly due to the still-persistent attitude that since infectious diseases affect both men and women, it’s best to focus on control and treatment ‘and to leave it to others to address social problems that may exist in society, such as gender inequalities after an outbreak has ended’.18 Academics are also at fault here: a recent analysis of 29 million papers in over 15,000 peer-reviewed titles published around the time of the Zika and Ebola epidemics found that less than 1% explored the gendered impact of the outbreaks.19 But, explains a WHO report, the belief that gender doesn’t matter is a dangerous position which can hinder preventative and containment efforts, as well as leaving important insights into how diseases spread undetected.20
Failing to account for gender during the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu virus) outbreaks meant that ‘government officials tended to deal with men because they were thought to be the owners of farms, despite the fact that women often did the majority of work with animals on backyard farms’.21 During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, ‘initial quarantine plans ensured that women received food supplies, but did not account for water or fuel’. In Sierra Leone and other developing countries, fetching fuel and water is the job of women (and of course fuel and water are necessities of life), so until the plans were adjusted, ‘women continued to leave their houses to fetch firewood, which drove a risk of spreading infection’.22
Women’s care-taking responsibilities also have more deadly consequences for women in pandemics. Women do the majority of care for the sick at home. They also make up the majority of ‘traditional birth attendants, nurses and the cleaners and laundry workers in hospitals, where there is risk of exposure’, particularly given these kinds of workers ‘do not get the same support and protection as doctors, who are predominantly men’.23 Women are also those who prepare a body for a funeral, and traditional funeral rites lead many to be infected.24 In Liberia, during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, women were estimated to make up 75% of those who died from the disease;25 in Sierra Leone, the ‘epicentre’ of the outbreak, UNICEF estimated that up to 60% of those who died were women.26
A 2016 paper27 also found that in the recent Ebola and Zika epidemics international health advice did not ‘take into account women’s limited capacity to protect themselves from infection’.28 In both cases, advice issued was based on the (inaccurate) premise that women have the economic, social or regulatory power ‘to exercise the autonomy contained in international advice’. The result was that already-existing gender inequalities were ‘further compounded’ by international health advice.
We need to address the gender data gap when it comes to post-disaster relief with some urgency, because there is little doubt that climate change is making our world more dangerous. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, it’s nearly five times more dangerous than it was forty years ago: between 2000 and 2010 there were 3,496 natural disasters from floods, storms, droughts and heat waves, compared to 743 natural disasters in the 1970s.29 And beyond analyses that suggest climate change can be a factor in the outbreak of conflict30 and pandemic,31 climate change itself is causing deaths. A 2017 report in the journal Lancet Planetary Health predicted that weather-related disasters will cause 152,000 deaths a year in Europe between 2071 and 2100.32 This compares to 3,000 deaths a year between 1981 and 2010.33 And, as we will see, women tend to dominate the figures of those who die in natural disasters as well.
We didn’t have firm data on the sex disparity in natural-disaster mortality until 2007, when the first systematic, quantitative analysis was published.34 This examination of the data from 141 countries between 1981 to 2002 revealed that women are considerably more likely to die than men in natural disasters, and that the greater the number of people killed relative to population size, the greater the sex disparity in life expectancy. Significantly, the higher the socio-economic status of women in a country, the lower the sex gap in deaths.
It’s not the disaster that kills them, explains Maureen Fordham. It’s gender – and a society that fails to account for how it restricts women’s lives. Indian men have been found to be more likely to survive earthquakes that hit at night ‘because they would sleep outside and on rooftops during warm nights, a behavior impossible for most women’.35 In Sri Lanka, swimming and tree climbing are ‘predominantly’ taught to men and boys; as a result, when the December 2004 tsunami hit (which killed up to four times as many women as men36) they were better able to survive the floodwaters.37 There is also a social prejudice against women learning to swim in Bangladesh, ‘drastically’ reducing their chances of surviving flooding,38 and this socially created vulnerability is compounded by women not being allowed to leave their home without a male relative.39 As a result, when cyclones hit, women lose precious evacuation time waiting for a male relative to come and take them to a safe place.
They also lose time waiting for a man to come and tell them there’s a cyclone coming in the first place. Cyclone warnings are broadcast in public spaces like the market, or in the mosque, explains Fordham. But women don’t go to these public spaces. ‘They’re at home. So they’re totally reliant on a male coming back to tell them they need to evacuate.’ Many women simply never get the message.
A male-biased warning system is far from the only part of Bangladesh’s cyclone infrastructure that has been built without reference to women’s needs. Cyclone shelters have been built ‘by men for men’, says Fordham, and as a result they are often far from safe spaces for women. Things are slowly changing, but there is a ‘huge legacy’ of old-style cyclone shelters, which are basically just ‘a very large concrete box’. Traditionally the shelter is just one big mixed-sex
