Gender equality in climate policy and practice hindered by assumptions

Abstract

Gender has a powerful influence on people’s experience of, and resilience to, climate change. Global climate change policy is committed to tackling gender inequalities in mitigation and adaptation. However, progress is hindered by numerous challenges, including an enduring set of gender assumptions: women are caring and connected to the environment, women are a homogenous and vulnerable group, gender equality is a women’s issue and gender equality is a numbers game. We provide an overview of how these assumptions essentialize women’s and men’s characteristics, narrowly diagnose the causes of gender inequality, and thereby propel strategies that have unintended and even counterproductive consequences. We offer four suggestions for a more informed pursuit of gender equality in climate change policy and practice.

Main

Gender—in concert with other identities such as race, class and age—has a powerful influence on experiences of, and resilience to, the impacts of climate change. Gender norms and inequalities shape people’s ability to adapt and innovate^1,2,3,4,5. Across climate change hotspots in Asia and Africa, women and men use different strategies to handle the pressures of poverty, insecure livelihoods and high exposure to climatic shocks^6,7. Women work harder and longer, in poorer conditions that harm their health⁸. Men are more likely to migrate to find work, which is often insecure and unreliable. Rather than immutable biological differences in how women and men handle change, these patterns reflect gender norms and gendered power relations. Norms and relationships mediate whether and how women, men, households, communities and societies can act in the face of change⁴. Gender inequalities manifest in people’s vulnerability and resilience^4,9, their adaptation options¹⁰, whether their climate information needs are met¹¹, and how people experience and engage with climate change programmes and policies¹². As climates change, social and cultural expectations about what it is to be a woman or a man in any given society will shape people’s wellbeing^13,14.

Pursuing gender equality in climate change policy and practice is critical. In principle, gender equality is realized when people have equal conditions, treatments and opportunities to realize their full potential, irrespective of their gender identity. Gender equality requires eliminating stereotypes and prejudices about gender¹⁵, and creating institutions and environments that enable all people to exercise agency to cope, change and adapt¹⁶. Gender equality is enshrined in the pre-amble of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change¹⁷. Likewise, numerous funding bodies, task groups, action plans and policies, including the Green Climate Fund, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), require gender equality to be addressed across all aspects of delivery¹⁸. For instance, in 2017 the GEF shifted from a “gender-aware ‘do no harm’ approach” to a “gender-responsive ‘do good’ approach”¹⁹ that aligns with the IPCC’s emphasis on “involving women and men equally in the development and implementation of national climate policies and projects”²⁰. Good practice, expertise and guidance on gender equality and climate change is growing^21,22,23; commitments to gender equality are now embedded in climate change adaptation and mitigation schemes, such as the United Nation’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+)^13,24.

However, even with this global mandate, efforts to realize gender equality in climate change face many challenges. Alongside broader obstacles (Box 1), pathways to gender equality are obstructed by a series of assumptions and stereotypes (Box 2) that promote simplistic, and often ineffective, approaches. These include stereotypes of women as innately more caring, connected to the environment and vulnerable, and assumptions that targeting enough women leads to gender equality. Together, these assumptions conflate gender with sex (Box 3), and essentialize women’s and men’s characteristics as innate and unchangeable. In turn, policies and projects based on these assumptions misdiagnose the causes of gender inequality, and produce counterproductive strategies. Many of these assumptions are reinforced and exacerbated by broader and interrelated barriers, such as lack of funding and short timelines to understand and address gender equality (Box 1). It is easier, cheaper and quicker to define and measure gender equality as the number of women involved in a project or present at a meeting.

Here, we provide an overview of four common and interlinked assumptions, clarify their pitfalls, and detail how they mask underlying causes of gender inequality and hinder paths to equality within climate policy and practice. Understanding and interrogating such assumptions is a first step to disrupting and moving beyond them. We purposefully draw from post-2014 gender and climate change literature to give an overview of how assumptions manifest across the gamut of recent work in adaptation, mitigation and broader climate change policy, practice and research. The articles selected present compelling examples of gender assumptions in practice. We include research that perpetuates gender assumptions and critical research that identifies and critiques them. For instance, critical research on gender equality in mitigation schemes, such as REDD+ payments for ecosystem services (PES), is a vibrant and growing field^13,25,26,27. Where possible, we give examples from nascent research such as gender equality and climate-smart technology²⁸. Rather than qualify their extent, examples are intended to illustrate key assumptions and how they manifest in different contexts.

We juxtapose examples with lessons from development and gender literature, which has a long history of engaging with the feminist theory and practice to work towards gender equality (Table 1). Climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions often focus on developing countries, and thus can and should avoid repeating mistakes documented across the field of development²⁹. Finally, we offer four suggestions for a more informed pursuit of gender equality.

Table 1 Development of thinking and practice in gender and development compiled from refs. ^{30,73,86,87,88}

Box 1 Obstacles to gender equality in climate change responses

Alongside the assumptions discussed in this Review, there are broader obstacles to realizing gender equality in climate change responses. Gender-blindness—whereby gender issues are not considered at all—remains common. In 2018, an external audit of GEF-funded projects found that almost two-thirds did not include gender when they should have⁸⁹. Even when gender equality is included, it can be diluted⁸³ or manipulated for political ends⁹⁰. In other cases, gender equality is included as an afterthought or bureaucratic obligation, rather than receiving genuine commitment from the outset²⁵. When gender equality is a central goal, it can be thwarted by short timelines, complex organizational structures and lack of a clear vision¹². Other common obstacles to meaningful action include lack of funding or expertise⁹¹ and murky definitions of what gender equality entails^73,75.

Box 2 Gender assumptions and stereotypes

An assumption is not a lie or a falsehood, but something accepted as true without proof. Assumptions may be true in certain contexts, for certain people³¹, but the danger lies when they are taken for granted and then used as universally accepted truths. Unchallenged, gender assumptions perpetuate and reinforce unhelpful stereotypes. Gender stereotypes are part of a system of expectations held by societies about feminine and masculine roles⁹². Commonly, these have fallen across a gender binary of feminine traits and behaviours as ‘niceness/nurturance’ and masculine as ‘potency/power’. Gender stereotypes affect the judgements people make of others, with consequences for how people behave, are treated and define themselves^92,93. As such, gender stereotypes may become self-fulfilling^74,94, creating the illusion that gender differences, as natural and innate, are unchangeable.

Box 3 Sex disaggregation or gender analysis

Sex and gender are distinct but related. Sex differences are based on biological indicators that are used to categorize people as male, female or intersex. By contrast, gender is made up of socio-cultural expectations of what it is to be a woman, man, masculine or feminine. Gender is shaped by social norms, power and institutions. Gender identity shapes access to resources, how work is divided within households and communities, and norms around decision-making and mobility in different ways and contexts^95,96,97. Neither sex nor gender are binary; multiple sexes and multiple genders exist^77,92. Accurate and usable research requires investigating patterns linked to sex differences or gender^{77,84,98,99,100}. However, sex-disaggregated research—while important—cannot replace gender analysis on context-specific, socio-cultural dimensions that shape people’s experiences of agency, opportunity and society. When climate change policies and practical interventions use sex-disaggregated data in lieu of detailed gender research, they risk diagnosing gender inequalities as the consequence of innate sex differences¹⁰¹. Conflating sex-disaggregated research with gender research likewise reinforces unhelpful stereotypes across many fields, including behavioural economics⁷⁴, social and economic research on poverty alleviation¹⁰² and energy⁸⁴.

Gender assumptions

Recognizing and disrupting gender assumptions is a vital step on the path towards gender equality in climate change policy and practice. The following assumptions stereotype women as innately caring, connected to the environment and homogeneously vulnerable to climate change. Together, these stereotypes propel assumptions that gender equality is a women’s issue that can be addressed by increasing the number of women involved in climate change projects, policy and practice.

Women are caring and connected to the environment

A pervasive gender assumption still present across climate research, policy and practice is that women are innately caring and deeply connected to their natural environment. This assumption recapitulates ideas from 1970s ecofeminism (fourth column in Table 1). Ecofeminism extended biological traits associated with female bodies, such as birth and breast feeding, to essentialized female traits of caring and a deeper and innate connection with nature³⁰. Development furthered this ‘Earth mother myth’ by promoting the image of a timeless, natural female domain of subsistence, domesticity and environmental connection³⁰. Women are assumed to be more dependent on the environment for subsistence and domestic work, such as gathering firewood and water, or farming small plots of land, and thus more ‘in touch’ with their environment^31,32.

These stereotypes exist across the gamut of climate change policy, practice and research. For instance, in climate change discourse, women are often depicted as connected to the environment through domestic labour, despite growing empirical evidence on different (and changing) gendered divisions of labour in different contexts^28,33. In Nicaragua, an adaptation project introduced wood-saving stoves as a gender-sensitive technology to benefit women, who were viewed as traditional wood gatherers²⁸. Rather than understanding gendered household labour (whereby men, and sometimes only men, collected wood), the project ‘ticked the box’ of gender equality and reinforced stereotypes about women’s responsibility for household chores. These stereotypes are also found in research. One ‘lab-in-the-field’ experiment found that women’s presence at 50% in decision-making groups enhanced conservation outcomes and suggested that the “stronger environmental preferences of women are more easily achieved under the additional support of PES”³⁴. This interpretation positions women as holding innate environmental preferences.

Interpreting caring norms and connection to nature as innate feminine qualities obscures a wide range of factors that shape people’s experiences and expectations about their roles. Rather than an innate aspect of being female, caring and valuing care work comes through socialization, “wherein girls learn from their mothers and others that caring is women’s work”³⁵. These norms around women’s domestic and care work are related to the gendered acceptability of other types of (paid) work, and mobility and respectability³⁶. In climate change adaptation, this assumption risks saddling women with greater responsibility to act as ‘saviours’ of environments, households and communities³⁰. For example, Nicaraguan climate change policy narratives depict women as the natural saviours of both the environment and their communities because of their special and natural ‘connectedness to nature’³⁷.

Women are homogenous and vulnerable

Building on the assumption of women’s innate connection to nature is a second enduring stereotype that women are inherently more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change. The argument follows that because women are more reliant on the environment, changes to water supply, forest coverage and rainfall will disproportionately affect women’s productive and caring labour^31,32. As such, addressing women’s vulnerability and marginalization is seen as the path to reaching gender equality in climate change. For instance, at national and district levels in Tanzania and Uganda, policies and development plans to build climate change resilience characterized women as marginalized and vulnerable, while men were largely ignored³⁸. In Burkina Faso, REDD+ projects assumed that women’s vulnerability was inherently connected to their poverty and reliance on forest resources³⁹. By extension, the project equated reducing women’s poverty with reaching gender equality.

Essentializing women as a vulnerable group with homogenous climate change experiences and adaptation needs can exacerbate inequalities and obscure opportunities to address different people’s needs. For example, in Mali, older and younger women and men pursued different farming strategies, held different goals and thus had very different climate information needs¹¹. However, the information provided by Mali’s agrometeorological advisory programme was not tailored to these needs, and was thus only useful for around 15% of men. In Tanzania, access to climate change adaptation strategies is dependent on marital status. Married women are able to pursue adaptation strategies, such as livelihood diversification and irrigation and water management, that unmarried women (young or widowed) cannot³. Likewise, in Nicaragua, male widowers are particularly vulnerable to water and resource scarcity because policymakers assumed that water collection—and it’s increasing difficulty—was purely a women’s issue³⁷.

Experience in development shows that essentializing women as a homogenous and vulnerable group risks overlooking power and status conferred by multiple identities within the social structures of a given place. People’s gender intersects with other identities—including caste, class, ethnicity, age, health, sexuality and nationality, among others—in ways that shape vulnerability and resilience (sixth and seventh columns in Table 1). This intersection of identities, including gender, is defined as intersectionality⁴⁰. Policies and studies that take intersectionality into account are better able to address people’s different and gendered needs^40,41. Recent work on climate-smart agriculture has called for research to move beyond conceptualizing women as a homogenously vulnerable group and to embrace intersectionality to ensure locally relevant and targeted strategies to enhance climate change resilience⁴².

Gender equality is a women’s issue

Viewing women as uniformly vulnerable to climate change propels the assumption that gender equality is a women’s issue. This assumption echoes the ‘women in development’ era (third column in Table 1), which targeted women to improve development outcomes, in effect using women as a means to an end without considering their diverse needs and aspirations⁴³. Gender equality can be pursued for intrinsic reasons—where people are viewed as active agents in development⁴⁴—or instrumental reasons—where people are viewed as objects, tools or a means to an environmental or development end⁴⁵. An intrinsic approach seeks to enhance gender equality for its own sake, by supporting the wellbeing, agency, livelihoods and prospects⁴⁶ of people as active agents^44,47 in their own lives and contexts. In contrast, in an instrumental approach, women end up working for development⁴⁵, rather than development working for them (third column in Table 1). This overt focus on women stems from early efforts to redress gender-blindness in development practice (second column in Table 1)^48,49. During the 1970s and beyond, explicitly targeting women as the recipients and instruments of development played an important and warranted role in changing development discourse by bringing international attention to gender inequality. However, it also had a number of unintended negative consequences, including increasing time burdens and workloads, without changing women’s status or agency in society or within households⁵⁰.

At times, climate change practice recapitulates an instrumental approach of targeting women as a means to realizing climate change resilience. For instance, resilience-building policies in Tanzania and Uganda position women as more productive and simply lacking the necessary resources to realize their full productive potential³⁸. Research into the gendered preferences for climate-smart agricultural technologies seeks to align benefits with women’s needs because women “represent a crucial resource in agriculture and the rural economy through their roles as farmers and entrepreneurs”⁵¹. In India, projects seek to provide women with better access to technology and climate information, assuming that women will then play a more prominent role in household decisions about planting⁵². However, access alone does not guarantee that information will be translated into meaningful change, particularly if agency is curtailed by social norms of household decision-making¹².

Unintended side-effects of targeting women as a means to an end are manifesting across climate change practice. For example, in Uganda, Ghana and Bangladesh, labour requirements are a disincentive for women to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices because new, labour-intensive tasks such as vermiculture and composting are more likely to fall to women⁴². In Burkina Faso, a REDD+ programme connected women with global markets for non-timber forestry products³⁹. The project sought to concurrently enhance gender equality by reducing poverty and to mitigate climate change by reducing pressure on timber resources. However, in this instance, connecting women with markets as the pathway to gender equality ignored inequalities among women, assumed that their desire to be involved in the programme was a given and ignored the possibility that their labour would be exploited. In development, similar fair trade initiatives—such as the shea butter industry—that sought to empower poor women by incorporating them into global value chains inadvertently led to low renumeration and exploitation^39,53.

Finally, a narrow focus on women in climate change adaptation or mitigation can eclipse understandings of local socio-cultural contexts and power structures, leading to misguided strategies that risk backfiring and creating greater inequality. For instance, if targeting women does not align with culture and existing power structures, there may be a backlash (fifth column in Table 1). A study of knowledge, attitudes and practices of organizations supporting climate change adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa found that projects that began by emphasizing the benefits and empowerment of women had not been well received by communities, whereas those that framed the project as community-based (but still incorporated the same gender components) had been more widely accepted⁵⁴.

Gender equality is a numbers game

Finally, pursuing gender equality by focusing on women leads to the assumption that equal or greater numbers of women in attendance in a forum or activity is an appropriate proxy for equality. By extension, this assumption suggests that increasing the numbers of women that participate in, or benefit from, development programmes corresponds neatly with women becoming empowered. As such, gender equality becomes little more than a numbers game. The term ‘gender equality’ can easily be misconstrued as ‘sameness’ in participation or benefits¹⁵. For example, quotas are a popular standard in governing bodies. They are often supported by empirical research pointing to how women’s participation can change both process and outcomes⁵⁵. Recent research on the impact of gender quotas on PES outcomes found that groups with a 50% quota of women were more likely to distribute payments equally among members, and interpreted this outcome as equality. However, a more appropriate measure of equality is whether people’s circumstances, characteristics and agency allow them to convert payments into desired and fair opportunities¹⁵. Thus, rather than equal payments, realizing equal outcomes requires identifying the benefits and costs of an activity for individuals in the community alongside local perceptions of fair outcomes. In many cases, what is fair will differ from equal payments¹⁶, because fairness is not always akin to equality (as sameness). For instance, in cases of unequal power relations, equal distribution of payments or material resources may overlook the unequal distributions of costs, and thus sustain existing inequalities.

This assumption also conflates more or less equal levels of participation as empowerment. Projects may define empowerment loosely as better participation in the decision-making process⁵⁶, with a focus on equal opportunity. Equating equal numbers with empowerment can lead to a ‘tyranny of participation’⁴³, whereby turning up is defined as empowerment, and the social, cultural and structural barriers to meaningful empowerment are neither acknowledged nor addressed⁵⁷. Simply encouraging equal numbers of women to participate may merely serve to reinforce traditional gender roles. For instance, an analysis of REDD+ policies globally found that gender equality was defined as women’s participation. However, this participation often amounted to women as passive recipients or as a means to enhancing project effectiveness²⁵. For instance, even when projects successfully increase women’s income, this benefit may not empower women to have greater control over how that income is used⁵⁸. In an effort to challenge gender norms, resilience-building activities in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia provided women’s groups with goats, which were traditionally kept by men¹². Although women did make decisions and take on new responsibilities for the livestock, the initiative had no clear impact on decision-making within households or more broadly, and thus did not shift gender norms towards empowerment.

Treating the number of women as a proxy for equality is counterproductive when projects seek to include women in decision-making and leadership positions. Specifically, if barriers to meaningful participation are not addressed, then providing incentives for women to participate in decision-making may backfire, reinforce or exacerbate existing power imbalances^{59,60,61,62,63}. Specifically, insisting that women should be newly positioned as decision-makers without addressing how this might challenge social norms^64,65,66 can lead to increased violence at home, or backlash among male community leaders^63,67. In India, REDD+ projects aimed to have an equal numbers of women and men in decision-making groups⁶⁸. However, women had little to no influence on the decision-making process, were unable to sway the opinions and interests of the most powerful in the group and were dissatisfied with eventual benefit-sharing decisions and accountability within the group. Likewise, in Nepal, REDD+ projects targeted women but their ideas were not listened to, no women held leadership positions and there was no mechanism to ensure equitable benefit sharing or empowerment beyond participation in numbers²⁶. Thus, fulfilling a quota of women in decision-making in isolation, without also considering other barriers to full inclusion, is unlikely to produce gender equitable outcomes. Equality in numbers is a poor proxy for gender equality. It obscures whether opportunities, access and participation translate into meaningful and actionable change for different people.

These four interconnected assumptions impoverish the pursuit of gender equality in climate change policy, research and practice. A myopic focus on women, or on one aspect of women’s lives (for example, money or participation) obscures the power structures and relationships that bound people’s agency¹⁶. Power structures, gender norms and relations, and gendered vulnerabilities are complex, and can become particularly dynamic in the face of climatic stress. For instance, in drought-stricken Isiolo County in Kenya, water scarcity has not only made men’s incomes insecure and disrupted their traditional gender role of providing for their families, but has also changed norms around marriage, polygamy and separations, leading to new forms of multi-generational and multi-locational households with new vulnerabilities⁶⁹. Such an example challenges the assumption that women and men exist as ‘discrete variables’¹⁶. Instead, people are inextricably embedded in households, communities and, more broadly, dynamic and power-laden socio-ecological systems⁷⁰. Gender equality requires a deeper diagnosis of context-specific and intersectional vulnerability and need, and strategies that ensure women and men participate in projects in meaningful ways that support their rights, voice and influence.

Towards informed pursuit of gender equality

A first step to disrupting these assumptions is to recognize, critique and test them. However, moving beyond them requires concurrent and concerted effort to dismantle broader, interrelated barriers to gender equality. We offer four broad suggestions for a more informed pursuit of gender equality in climate change policy and practice.

First, be specific about how organizations, projects and policies seek to realize gender equality. A useful distinction is whether an organization, project or policy seeks to reach (through participation in terms of numbers), benefit (through outcomes such as improved income or voice) or empower (through enhanced ability to make and enact decisions in a given context)⁷¹. The assumptions we have described are particularly problematic when they muddy the goals and measurement of reaching, benefiting or empowering⁷¹ women and men. Even though efforts that reach or benefit are important steps towards gender equality, ‘reach’ is not akin to ‘benefit’, which is in turn not akin to ‘empowerment’, because empowerment will require changes to social, economic and institutional structures. The precise use of language of gender equality, especially outcomes, can combat this muddiness. In addition, where possible, seek to serve people and communities in terms of agency, wellbeing, livelihoods and prosperity. Ensuring those less empowered can contribute to, find opportunity within and influence trajectories of change requires identifying and challenging socio-cultural structures that set the rules of play⁵⁷. Rather than something that can be done to someone, empowerment is an ongoing process of challenging inequitable gender norms by removing barriers for individual self-actualization and collective mobilization through agency and consciousness (seventh column in Table 1)^72,73.

Second, conduct, critique and communicate gender- and sex-disaggregated research. When reading and reviewing research that seeks to inform or evaluate gender equality in practice, read critically to see if research is reinforcing assumptions, even inadvertently. For example, in the field of agriculture, unexamined, inaccurate ‘facts’, such as ‘women produce 60–80% of the world’s food’ continue to negatively influence project design, obscure the need for accurate data and impede progress to gender equality³¹. Beware of research that naturalizes gender differences as sex differences. For example, many findings in behavioural economics (for example, that women are more risk averse than men) are reported through a lens of stereotypes, serving to naturalize sex differences as innate and unchangeable⁷⁴. Beyond critiquing existing research, future research on how these assumptions emerged across multiple fields can help explain why they remain powerful. For instance, they may be symptomatic of the ‘watering down’ of gender equality through different levels of policy (re)interpretation or stages of policy cycles⁷⁵. How global goals, including gender equality, are interpreted and enacted in local level policies is a growing research focus⁷⁶.

Third, understand and use robust measures of gender equality in policy and practice. While sex- and gender-disaggregated analysis improves science quality⁷⁷, lack of quality data is an ongoing challenge. Monitoring and evaluation that integrates gender from the outset is necessary to build the evidence base on the links between gender actions, climate change initiatives and ultimate outcomes⁷¹. To this end, climate policy and practice can draw on emerging standardized measures for empowerment and gender equality that can be tailored to specific contexts⁷⁸. Such measures include, for instance, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index⁷⁹, the Individual Deprivation Measure⁸⁰—which captures intersectional aspects of multidimensional poverty—and the Enabling Gender Equality in Agricultural and Environmental Innovation project—which offers a methodology for understanding the connection between gender norms and innovation⁸¹.

Fourth, work to question and disrupt the deeper, difficult-to-quantify and more intractable barriers to gender equality, as well as barriers that support, reinforce and even encourage assumptions within funding structures, projects and institutions. The former includes barriers to tenure rights, education, access to material resources and norms shaping social expectations of women and men in a given context. The latter requires climate change institutions themselves to create the environment and capacities to move beyond unhelpful gender assumptions. This includes recognizing and countering short timelines, supporting and funding gender expertise, and developing and implementing intersectional gender approaches to climate change programmes. For policymakers, this may require a better understanding of how the translation of gender equality through policy scales risks co-opting gender equality concepts and goals^82,83, and ameliorating this. Finally, there is a need to bridge disciplinary silos to ensure that gender equality lessons inform climate change projects and sectors, such as energy⁸⁴ and climate services⁸⁵, where engagement and research are more nascent.

Conclusion

The persistence of gender assumptions hinders efforts to realize gender equality in climate change policy and practice. Old tropes of gender equality as a women’s issue support counterproductive strategies. Alongside the growing body of expertise, gender and development literature provides lessons to climate change practitioners and researchers about the need to disrupt and counteract these assumptions. Gender inequality is a systemic problem, comprising complex and dynamic relationships, norms and processes. In concert with clear goals and monitoring, robust research and communication, and building enabling environments and capacities, recognizing and disrupting the gender assumptions described here is an important step towards meaningful change.