Unveiling the Disproportionate Impact: Women in the Shadow of Disasters

In the wake of calamities, usually, entire communities reel from the aftermath. Yet, data, anecdotes, news and lived experiences have often pointed to how it's the women who bear the brunt of the devastation, while facing unique challenges and vulnerabilities. From natural disasters like earthquakes and floods to humanitarian crises such as pandemics, women are disproportionately affected during calamities, yet their struggles often remain overlooked.

To understand this phenomenon better, and how can help mitigate this gendered impact, HerZindagi spoke to Kanta Singh, Deputy Representative, UN Women India.

Why Are Women Disproportionately Affected?

Gender, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, income, geography, and other socioeconomic factors determine people's experiences of conflicts and disasters, explained Kanta.

She said, “Disasters can exacerbate prevailing gender inequalities due to a range of factors:

• Discrimination and unequal access to opportunities, natural resources, and other productive resources;
• Unequal access to finance, technology, knowledge, and mobility;
• Socially constructed differences in capacities and capabilities; and
• Discriminatory social, cultural, and legal norms and practices.”

To understand how deeply gendered the fallout of calamities is, please take a look at our story: Caught in the Crossfire: The Gendered Fallout of Wars and Natural Calamities on Women

Kanta went on to highlight that only one in three people is covered globally by early warning systems.

“Women and various socioeconomically marginalised groups often face barriers to access for early warnings, and for disaster and risk information overall. This can occur because of lower access to mobile phones and digital tools which are used to disseminate early warnings and risk information,” she said.

This lower access is often the result of social norms, where women and girls have historically been left out of education and thus may not be digitally literate. “They don’t have access to communication and digital tools, or sufficient education to use these tools and interpret the information – or the result of economic barriers – whereby people may simply not be able to afford mobile phones and digital tools. Due to social norms and mobility constraints, women and girls may also lack access to local point sources of information – such as government officials or local disaster management authorities,” explained Kanta.

The disadvantages for women and girls is multi-pronged and would require interventions on several levels. Their experience of disasters and crises is what it is today, due to socio-cultural systems around them being gendered from early on.

“As a result, despite early warnings science and technology being sophisticated today, these access and interpretation barriers result in a higher risk of loss of life and economic losses for women and other marginalized groups,” said Kanta.

Gender-Based Violence Peaks In The Aftermath of Disasters

Targeted violence against vulnerable groups is often observed to increase in the aftermath of a disaster or conflict, with gender-based violence being especially widespread.

“Where displacement occurs as a result of disaster or conflict, resettlement camps are often set up without consultation with women and girls, resulting in heightened gender-based violence in these areas. Instances of sexual exploitation and abuse, harassment and trafficking have also been reported in camps and settlements across different contexts,” said Kanta. First-hand accounts and detailed experiences of such occurings can be found in our story here.

Across countries, women are also far less likely to have formal legal ownership over homes, land, and other productive assets, Even where men and women work to a comparable extent in the informal sector, women and girls are disproportionately represented in some of the most unprotected sub-sectors in the informal economy, such as waste pickers, street vendors, domestic workers, and home-based workers, rendering them largely invisible within formal social protection measures even in non-crisis settings (ILO 2018).

“As a result, economic losses faced by women are often not adequately accounted for in either disaster risk reduction planning, or crisis response, whether in the form of risk insurance, recovery programmes such as programmes for housing reconstruction, or compensation for livelihood and asset loss, and their vulnerabilities become exacerbated when crisis disrupts their existing socioeconomic networks,” said Kanta.

A 2019 report by UN Women, Unicef, and partners, found huge gaps in disaggregated quantitative data at a global level, with a near total absence of sex and age disaggregated impact data in global disaster impact databases. These data gaps that lead to planning gaps, severely exacerbate existing gender inequality.

Women from Marginalised Groups Suffer More

Women from marginalized groups already have limited access to resources, and are often dependent on social welfare policies to meet economic needs for themselves and their families. At the time of a crisis, whether a natural disaster a public health crisis or conflict, the available social protection systems typically tend to get disrupted, leaving women without support.

“Take the case of the 2010 flooding in Pakistan, where many women lacked mobility due to financial and familial restrictions, which limited or prevented their access to conventionally delivered aid, whether in the form of food assistance, medical services (especially reproductive health services), and even access to toilets. Many women also lacked national identification cards, which limited their ability to receive assistance from relief schemes that required such identification,” said Kanta.

Given that women face higher threats of violence in the aftermath of a crisis as discussed earlier, women from marginalized groups face the same threats but have even higher barriers to getting help as the result of having little to no access to money, legal resources, or social networks, and in many cases, facing even more restrictive social norms.

Kanta further highlighted, that relief assistance and compensation typically focus on households as the unit, with the male head of the household receiving the assistance. “This further disempowers women in the household, given that their livelihood and economic losses are not compensated and their welfare assistance is disrupted, together making them even more vulnerable,” she said.

There has indeed been an increase in post-disaster needs assessments (PDNAs) that state that the gender-differentiated impacts of disasters, particularly violence, exclusion, and inequality, are exacerbated by the disaster, but these impacts have yet to be translated into gender-specific differentiated needs, policies, interventions, and projects in recovery and reconstruction efforts in most contexts. Much more needs to be done to assess and address women’s issues within communities and at the household level, taking other social and economic factors into account.

What Needs To Be Done

Another reason women are disproportionately affected is that they’re left out of most of the planning and preparation bits. “A simple example is that of setting up sanitation facilities without consulting women and girls, which often results in such facilities often being located right next to those used by men, or in locations without adequate lighting and other safety features. As a consequence, women and girls tend not to use these toilets at all, or face physical and sexual threats when they do,” explained Kanta. “These kinds of risks also often exacerbate the psychological and physical strains on pregnant women’s health, given that such settlements already lack adequate reproductive health facilities.”

Kanta highlighted methods and actions that would have a high impact:

• Data: One of the most important things governments and relevant civil society organisations can do, is to address the issue of severe gaps in sex, age, and disability disaggregated data collection, analysis, and use, for disaster preparedness, disaster response, and recovery. This disaggregated data gap remains the core barrier to an inclusive DRR ecosystem.
• Participation: This lack of data combined with social norms (prevalent across the affected communities but also within government agencies and organisations working in this space), results in significant exclusion of women from planning and decision-making around crises and natural disasters. It is crucial to involve women throughout the planning and response cycle, including engaging with women at the grassroots to get their perspectives on how to develop more gender and socially inclusive plans.
• Local capacity: Since local-level actors are first responders in the event of a natural hazard or a crisis of any other kind, it is of urgent importance that adequate measures be taken to build and strengthen disaster/crisis management reduction capacity at the local level, including peacebuilding and mediation processes in contexts of security and conflict. From the viewpoint of gender inclusion, this is important because local spaces are the primary point of access for women and other marginalised groups, and because women, those with disabilities, and those from marginalised groups tend to be far less represented and heard at higher levels of authority and decision-making.

Here, it is also important to include women-led organisations and women’s collectives, since they may already have well-established mechanisms of coordination across their networks, and can quickly facilitate the inclusion of women and other vulnerable groups who can be overlooked by government officials or official procedures.