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Meenaben Khokhar cultivates two acres of land in her home village in the eastern part of Gujarat, India. She grows millet, which provides food for her family, and fodder for her two cows. In April last year, her region experienced an extreme heatwave, with temperatures soaring as
high as 44°C. This led to an acute water shortage. The cost of watering her crops doubled. Local farmers and labourers began suffering from severe health issues: heat stress, dehydration, urinary tract infections.

In June, just as the heat began to let up, a powerful cyclone – Biparjoy – struck the area. The dried-out land was especially prone to flooding, which washed away the newly sown, nutrient-rich top soil. Overnight, Meenaben lost
her already depleted crop and cows. Worse, her home was destroyed. She and her family had nowhere to live for weeks as they rebuilt their house, and little means of raising income. As if this wasn’t enough, several bouts of rains and hailstorms struck in August, ruining their crops again.

As the climate crisis intensifies, stories of such cascading disasters are becoming more and more commonplace. But what is less reported is the fact that women tend to experience these consequences far more acutely than men do. 

Here’s The Evidence

Plenty of activists and researchers have campaigned on this issue for years. But until relatively recently, they didn’t have the data to back this up. And the data, newly emerging, is pretty shocking.

A report released this month by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) demonstrates just how much more acutely rural women experience climate shocks compared to men. It turns out that
if average temperatures increase by just 1°C, rural women face a massive 34% greater reduction in their total incomes compared to men.

The most comprehensive study yet of its kind, the report draws on data from 109,341 households (representing over 950 million rural people) across 24 low and middle-income countries. This data was cross-referenced with 70 years of daily local rain, snow and temperature levels, allowing the researchers to assess how specific types of climate stressors impact people’s income differently depending on their wealth, gender and age.

The data reveals that on average, heat stress akin to that experienced by Meenaben last year causes female-headed households to lose 8% more income than male-headed households. This translates to an increased income gap of $83 per person per year, totalling a massive $37 billion across the 24 countries.

Floods also impact women disproportionately, with female-headed households losing 3% of income compared to those headed by men. That’s $16 billion a year. This is despite the fact that plots managed by
women actually generate more value than those of men when floods hit, but lose massively in terms of off-farm income.

A patriarchal climate

How does this happen? The interplay of these factors vary by local context. But the themes are often similar: women already dedicate much more of their time than men to domestic and care responsibilities, and such demands dramatically increase in response to extreme temperatures or disasters. Women are more prone than men to lose employment opportunities outside of farming. And due to their care responsibilities, they are less able to migrate in search of jobs.

One of the most crucial factors, however, is unequal access to land. Women are far less likely to be able to secure rights to their land and when they
do, this land tends to be smaller and of lower quality than that secured by men. Research consistently indicates that land security and land size are crucial factors in farmers’ ability to bear the costs of adaptation. Gendered norms also dictate the crops and livestock
controlled by women – which are often of lower value. While cattle and other more profitable breeds tend to be under the control of men, women tend to be responsible for poultry. Girls also  suffer disproportionately: they are often taken out of school or married off early
in response to the financial impact of extreme weather events. To top it all off, economic and food insecurity is also associated with increased gender-based violence.

No disaster plan accounts for these kinds of cascading catastrophes: women don’t tend to have the same access men do to critical financial services such as loans or insurance. Often this means they are forced to go to private money lenders, pushing them into a vicious cycle of debt and
poverty. This deepens their vulnerability by undermining their capacity to adapt.

Such inequalities are far from restricted to the countries assessed in the FAO report or to rural areas. Gender bias significantly impacts women and their ability to adapt to climate impacts in the US and across Europe.

Want to fight climate change? Listen to women

I spoke to Peg Spitzer, who for her latest book conducted 85 in-depth interviews with female climate change activists based in rural areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America.

She told me: « The overarching issue here is the patriarchal nature of most societies. The fact that women are left out of decision making is really significant. New ideas on how to deal with environmental crises are being introduced, but they’re not necessarily the right ones. The people who can tell you what the right ideas are aren’t being listened to!”

Some estimates indicate that 43% of the world’s agricultural workforce are women. This figure is far higher in poorer countries. Yet only 6% of the 4164 actions proposed in national climate action plans relating to the 24 countries analysed by the FAO even mention women.

Yet many women have found ways to overcome these barriers. Nicholas Sitko, Senior Economist at FAO told me: “A wealth of qualitative evidence shows that when you work with local communities and provide opportunities to make evident the effects of gender inequalities, things do start to change. »

Meenaben Khokhar’s story was told to me by Mansi Shah, Program Manager at India’s Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). Shah told me that after losing her crops and home last year, Khokhar refused to believe that her only option was taking out an expensive loan. She and a group of other local grassroots leaders worked with SEWA to find an alternative, securing access to an emergency fund to help small farmers like her get back on their feet in the absence of – or while waiting for – aid or insurance. Since then, she has worked to launch heat and climate shock insurance products for female farmers in the local area.

Also in Gujarat, Trupti Jain and her husband Biplab Paul wanted to find ways around the issue of land ownership. The couple developed a simple form of irrigation that can provide water during times of climate stress – and now work with local women to install and manage it in their areas. It is the local women who own the technology, meaning that although securing access to land is still very difficult, the women own access to water. This Bhungroo
technology is now being introduced in other countries – with careful appreciation of the differences in each local cultural context.

In Mali, women-only savings clubs help female farmers pay for newer, more climate-smart technologies. In Guatemala, learning how to build and manage mealworm farms allows Indigenous women to produce protein-rich mealflour within their homes. Plenty more examples of innovative local solutions can be found in CGIAR’s gender newsletter and in Peg Spitzer’s book, Empowering Female Climate Change Activists in the Global South.

On their own, none of these solutions will address patriarchal norms and a gender-blind capitalist system. Although there are ways in which clever policies and projects can get around the inequalities of this system, ultimately it is the norms themselves that need to be confronted. Women are leading on that front as well. In Europe, a group of Swiss activists known as the KlimaSeniorinnen are suing their government in the European Court of Human Rights’ first ever climate case. Their argument is based on the fact that, as older women, they are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change.

As Aditi Mukherji, Director of the Climate Change Impact Platform of CGIAR, a global partnership that unites international
organisations engaged in research about food security, said at the launch to the FAO report: « None of the world’s climate change policies will work unless we address the root causes of the crisis: inequality ».

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news in gender inequality research:

1. The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security launched its conflict tracker, a map updated each month that provides a snapshot of key risks for women in 25 conflict-affected countries.

2. A new report from the World Bank found that no country in the world affords women the same work opportunities as men. When the impact of childcare and safety policies are taken into account (which the bank did for the first time in this report) women are found to have just 64% of the legal protections men do.

3. The normalisation of misogynist treatment of women in obstetric care in the UK was revealed in this paper, also covered by The Conversation.

Get in touch

This is the very first edition of The Evidence so we’d love to know what you think. Do you have any suggestions about format or content? What topics relating to research into gender equity are you particularly interested in hearing about? What insights would be particularly useful to you?

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a brand new supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.