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 space. There are usually no separate latrines for men and women: ‘just a bucket in the corner and you might have 1,000 people in these places sheltering’.
Beyond the obvious problem of a single bucket for 1,000 people, the lack of sex segregation essentially locks women out of the shelters. ‘It’s embedded in Bangladeshi culture that women cannot mix with men and boys outside of their family males,’ explains Fordham, for fear of bringing shame on the family. Any woman mixing with those males ‘is just fair game for any kind of sexual harassment and worse. So the women won’t go to the shelters.’ The result is that women die at much higher rates (following the 1991 cyclone and flood the death rate was almost five times as high for women as for men40) simply for want of sex-segregated provision.
On the subject of the violence women face in disaster contexts, we know that violence against women increases in the ‘chaos and social breakdown that accompany natural disaster’ – but, in part because of that self-same chaos and social breakdown, we don’t know by exactly how much. During Hurricane Katrina local rape crisis centres had to close, meaning that in the days that followed no one was counting or confirming the number of women who had been raped.41 Domestic-violence shelters also had to close, with the same result. Meanwhile, as in Bangladesh, women were experiencing sexual violence in gender-neutral storm shelters. Thousands of people who had been unable to evacuate New Orleans before Katrina hit were temporarily housed in Louisiana’s Superdome. It didn’t take long for lurid stories of violence, of rapes and beatings, to start circulating. There were reports of women being battered by their partners.42
‘You could hear people screaming and hollering for people to help them, “Please don’t do this to me, please somebody help me”’, one woman recalled in an interview with IWPR.43 ‘They said things didn’t happen at the Superdome. They happened. They happened. People were getting raped. You could hear people, women, screaming. Because there’s no lights, so it’s dark, you know.’ She added, ‘I guess they was just grabbing people, doing whatever they wanted to do.’ Precise data on what happened to whom in Hurricane Katrina has never been collated.
For women who try to escape from war and disaster, the gender-neutral nightmare often continues in the refugee camps of the world. ‘We have learned from so many mistakes in the past that women are at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence if they don’t have separate bathrooms,’ says Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia.44 In fact international guidelines state that toilets in refugee camps should be sex-segregated, marked and lockable.45 But these requirements are often not enforced.
A 2017 study by Muslim Women’s charity Global One found that 98% of female refugees in Lebanon did not have access to separate latrines.46 Research by the Women’s Refugee Commission has found that women and girls in accommodation centres in Germany and Sweden are vulnerable to rape, assault and other violence because of a failure to provide separate latrines, shower facilities or sleeping quarters. Mixed living and sleeping quarters can mean women develop skin rashes from having to keep their hijab on for weeks.
Female refugees regularly47 complain that the remote location48 of many toilets is worsened by a lack of adequate lighting both on the routes to the latrines and in the facilities themselves. Large areas of the infamous Idomeni camp in Greece were described as ‘pitch-black’ at night. And although two studies have found that installing solar lighting or handing out individual solar lights to women in camps has had a dramatic impact on their sense of safety, it’s a solution that has not been widely adopted.49