Why Women’s Empowerment is Key to Environmental Policy
Article by Callum Boyce
Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash
Climate change is increasingly becoming one of the most significant challenges we face in contemporary society, with rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather events threatening to destroy ecosystems around the globe. At the same time, gender inequality remains a prevalent issue, seeing women in most countries around the world being denied the same rights and opportunities that men enjoy [1]. These two issues are intrinsically linked, seeing as women are most disproportionately affected by the worst effects of the climate crisis, despite typically being more environmentally proactive than men [2]. It is therefore my belief that the key to good pro-environmental policy is the empowerment of and equal inclusion of women in governmental decision-making.
Research has shown that, globally, women are more likely to experience the harms and risks that come with climate change in multiple areas of their everyday lives. For example, in collecting drinking water, women and girls carry the heaviest burden. They are responsible for water collection in 80% of households that do not have access to water on premises [3]. This problem is exacerbated by the climate crisis, with rising water demand and pollution increasing water stress; in 2023 an estimated 380 million women were living under high to critical water stress, projected to increase to 674 million by 2050 [4]. Additionally, women are more likely to be directly dependent on the land, with 38.7% of employed women working in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, yet only 13.8% of landholders were women which goes to show the gender injustice prevalent in contemporary society. For these reasons, it is clear that the importance of environmental quality to women and girls cannot be understated.
Why is it then that women are so tragically underrepresented in positions of power? At the COP29s organising committee in Azerbaijan this year, there were no women initially appointed, a decision only reversed after a public outcry [5]. The fact that no women were originally to be included in such an important committee is laughable, seeing as countries with a bigger share of women in parliament are more likely to ratify environmental treaties and adopt policies that address climate change [6] [7]. Furthermore, only 1 in 4 parliamentary positions are held by women globally. These examples show a clear lack of procedural justice in regards to women’s place in political structures. Women are significantly underrepresented in most democratic systems and men make up this imbalance, making the majority of decisions that affect environmental quality, despite typically having less first hand experience of the issues they aim to solve.
To expand on this, it is clear that the inclusion of women in environmental decision-making tends to yield more pro-environmental results. States headed by women are more likely to pass pro-environmental and climate change mitigation laws, and businesses run by women are likely to have higher social governance scores than those run by men and are less likely to be big polluters. Women are also more likely to engage in environmental activism outside of the system as formal procedures discriminate against women, as seen in the Love Canal case where a group of stay-at-home mothers lobbied for an investigation into the pollution in the area that they noticed was responsible for children and families becoming sick [8]. Unfortunately, as is often the case, these women were constantly dismissed due to their gender and it took over 40 years for any action to be taken by the state in response to this. This is just one of many similar cases where women who were trying to enact positive social change were sidelined and ignored simply because they are women, going to show that solving gender inequality would be significantly beneficial for the environment.
It is important to remember, however, that the motive for women’s empowerment should not be simply a means to an end for states and corporations trying to deliver policies or extract profit. From a feminist perspective, women should not be treated as ‘sustainability saviours’ who are called upon to take on more unpaid work in the name of gender equality [9]. That being said, it is very clear that equal inclusion of women in society is imperative for good pro-environmental policy; by prioritising women’s empowerment we pave the way for a more fair society benefiting both people and the planet.
Footnotes:
[1] Sherilyn MacGregor (2019) Core Essay: Sustainable Development Goal 5- Gender Equality.
[2] Sherilyn MacGregor (2020) Gender Matters in Environmental justice
[3] Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2019
[4] Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2023
[5] Women added to Cop29 climate summit committee after backlash
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/19/women-cop29-climate-summit-committee-backlash
[6] Silvia Lesi (2023) Gender and Climate Action
https://www.eib.org/en/stories/female-leaders-climate
[7] Kari Norgaad, and Richard York (2005) Gender Equality and State Environmentalism
[8] Congress and the Love Canal Disaster https://www.levin-center.org/what-is-oversight/portraits/love-canal/
[9] Dianne Elson (2015) Women’s Empowerment and environmental sustainability in the context of international UN agreements
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