GENDER EQUALITY, WORK, AND DISASTER REDUCTION:
MAKING THE CONNECTIONS
Elaine Enarson
Introduction1
Media accounts of disasters which relentlessly portray women beseeching help—their
homes crumbled around them, belongings scattered, family members injured or dead—reinforce
the victim paradigm which so discredits people’s resilience in emergencies. These images
particularly distort the complex and resourceful ways in which women respond to extreme
environmental events. This chapter is written to redress the balance, drawing attention to factors
magnifying the impacts of natural disasters on women and their work and to strategies for
capitalizing on these events as windows of opportunity for social change. How women’s and
men’s lives and livelihoods are intertwined before, during, and after natural disasters is not a
sidebar to the main story but a central part of the social experience of disasters and key to their
prevention. It follows that just and effective disaster interventions must be fine-tuned to reflect
the context-specific and embodied social worlds of women and men.
I draw on case studies from around the world to make the case, beginning with a brief
discussion of disasters as products not of nature but of human choices about global development.
Then I offer an overview of the root causes of gendered vulnerability. Because gender inequities
put women especially at risk, most of the subsequent discussion focuses on how disasters impact
women’s work. Here I focus on why and how women lose income, how disasters undermine
women’s social protection and increase their risk, the expansion of women’s domestic labor in
disasters, and new forms of work undertaken by women in disaster contexts. I follow up with a
speculative discussion about change, suggesting the need to prioritize women’s economic
recovery from disasters, use action research to learn from women’s and men’s disaster
experiences, and help organizations move toward gender-fair practices reducing vulnerability.
These strategies reflect the emerging view of disasters as unresolved problems of global
development and opportunities for building more just, sustainable, and disaster-resilient
communities. In my view, the International Labour Organization is uniquely positioned to
address economic issues arising in natural disasters from a gendered perspective. Its historic
mission to promote decent work and social justice, its tripartite structure, and its leadership
capacity and expertise lend comparative advantage at a time when disaster reduction, and not
disaster relief, is essential. For these reasons I highlight the work of the ILO.
Disasters By Design
Tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, earthquakes and floods may be predictable,
even routine, events but their social, political, and economic effects are neither inevitable nor
“natural.” Instead, we might speak of “disasters by design” because these events become
catastrophic largely as a result of political choices made about people and their land.2
1
This is a revised version of Gender and Natural Disasters, Working Paper # 1 (September, 2000)
prepared for the ILO InFocus Programme on Crisis Response and Reconstruction. Correspondence to E.
Enarson (eenarson@earthlink.net), 33174 Bergen Mt. Rd., Evergreen, CO, 80439, USA.
2
See D. Mileti, 1999, Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States. The
literature on disaster vulnerability is extensive. Living With Risk: A Global Review of Disaster Reduction
Initiatives, 2002, from the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), provides an excellent
introduction.
1
Environmental degradation, climate change, increasing social inequalities, population pressure,
hyperurbanization, and economic globalization are powerful global forces increasing the
likelihood of destruction after a major earthquake or cyclone; rising technological
interdependencies (e.g. in utility systems, financial markets, and electronic telecommunication
networks) also make these events more dangerous. A massive earthquake or volcanic eruption
simply lays bare the inequalities of social development which place some people more than others
in risky living conditions—on steep hillsides, in trailer homes on flood plains, in shantytown
dwellings—and undermine their capacity to mitigate, survive, or fully recovery from the effects
of catastrophe.
Three times as many natural disasters were reported in the 1990s as in the 1970s.
Whether measured by loss of life, damage to property and infrastructure, or indirect effects on
national economies, livelihoods, health and well-being, natural disasters are also increasingly
costly. Developing nations are most likely to depend on fragile natural resources economically,
most impacted economically by the short- and long-term costs of disasters, least able to afford
structural mitigation and social insurance protecting people in disasters, and most hard hit by the
diversion of funds from development to disaster relief and reconstruction. The great majority of
disaster-related injuries and deaths also occur in the least developed nations of Africa, Latin
America, and Asia.
Disaster risk is also differentially distributed within societies.3 Social vulnerability is a
complex concept but sensitizes us to people’s differential access to, and control over, the
resources needed to survive and recover from disasters, including control over land, money,
credit, and tools; large households with low dependency ratios; good health and personal
mobility; household entitlements and food security; secure housing in safe locations; freedom
from violence, strong social networks, transportation, time, information, and literacy in dominant
languages. While poor people in poor countries are more vulnerable in these terms, disaster
vulnerability is not synonymous with poverty. The rich can and do buy their way into harm’s way
in luxury beach homes or on steep hillsides subject to wildfire, but they are also more resilient to
economic loss. Most people lack control over the forces putting them near a raging Indonesian
forest fire or beneath a collapsing “mountain” of urban garbage in Manila. With less social choice
and fewer recovery resources, the poor pay with their lives and livelihoods.
In addition to the poor and economically insecure, those most at risk when extreme
environmental events occur are subordinated ethnic or racial groups, the frail elderly or disabled,
infants and young children, and socially excluded groups like undocumented workers, the
homeless, and street children. Often neglected in the list of at-risk groups are women and girls.
Across cultures, gender is the basis not only for social divisions of labor but social systems
distributing life chances, social power, personal autonomy, political voice—and the capacity to
anticipate, survive, and recover from natural disasters.
The gendered terrain of disaster
Researchers have documented persistent differences and inequalities throughout the
disaster process. 4 Gender differences are found in studies of mitigation, emergency
preparedness, voluntary action, emergency communication, the division of labor in disaster work,
See P. Blaikie, et al., 1994, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Natural Disaster.
For a literature survey, see A. Fothergill, 1996, “The Neglect of Gender in Disaster Work: An Overview
of the Literature.” For representative texts, see R. Wiest et al., 1994, “The needs of women in disasters and
emergencies;” B. Walker (ed.), 1994, Women and Emergencies; B. Byrne, 1995, Gender, Emergencies
and Humanitarian Assistance; P. Fernando and V. Fernando, 1997, South Asian Women: Facing Disasters,
Securing Life; E. Enarson and B.H. Morrow (eds.), 1998, The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through
Women’s Eyes; and B. Phillips and B.H. Morrow (eds.), forthcoming (2003), Women and Disaster.
3
4
2
post-traumatic stress, and coping strategies, among other areas. Masculinity norms may
encourage risky (“heroic”) action during the search and rescue period, debris removal, and
reconstruction, and deter men from approaching relief agencies or seeking counseling later.
Disaster mortality patterns are also gendered, though inconsistently,5 and increasing longevity
puts more women than men at risk of physical changes limiting their mobility in emergencies.
But women’s vulnerability to disasters resides primarily in gender inequality, not gender
difference. Women’s inability to enjoy their full human rights; limitations on personal autonomy
and political expression; barriers to literacy, education, employment and training; and constraints
on women’s health, time and personal security are all factors undermining their ability to
anticipate, prepare for, survive, respond to, and recover from disasters. Cultural constraints can
cost women’s lives, as was reported following Bangladesh’s devastating 1991 cyclone:6
[W]omen are deprived of the capacity to cope with disasters by being kept in dependent
positions in terms of accessing information from the world outside the bari, and by being
denied their right to take major decisions. In this respect, purdah as an institution which
prevents women from engaging in socio-economic roles outside the household directly
prescribes women’s vulnerability to disaster.
Economic security is a primary factor in social vulnerability. Disasters disrupt commerce
and markets, destroy productive resources and infrastructure, and vastly complicate people’s
family and work lives. Conversely, secure income, access to savings or credit, employment with
social protection, marketable job skills, education and training, and control over productive
resources are all assets enabling people in hazard-prone regions to survive interruptions in their
income, reduce losses to their homes or businesses, evacuate or relocate if necessary, rebuild
homes and businesses, and replace needed work space, tools, livestock, or equipment. Poor
women’s ability to earn money every day is an essential survival strategy for families living close
to the margin and struggling to cope with successive economic and environmental crises, but they
more than others lack access to these key resources.7 Full discussion of women’s economic status
is beyond the scope of this chapter, but as the majority of those who labor in the informal sector,
without basic social protections such as child care or insurance, without formal representation or
sustained dialogue with employers, and in workplaces which often jeopardize their health, women
are at risk long before tidal waves surge or crops lost to drought.
Restoring economic resources and capacities is essential to long-term disaster recovery
but simply restoring the status quo ante leaves women highly vulnerable. For example, an Oxfam
study of disaster vulnerability observed that prior to hurricane Mitch women in Honduras headed
more than one in four households (27%); 72% of these were supported at below-poverty levels
(vs. 63 % of all households); after 30 years of conflict, one in ten Guatemalan women is a
widow.8 In Southern Mozambique, one-third of all households were female-headed prior to the
devastating spring 2000 floods and patrilineality limited women’s control over land and other key
assets in this crisis.9 The direct and indirect impacts of natural disasters on women’s livelihoods
are still poorly understood, in part because their income-generating activities do not mirror those
of most men, but knowing what puts women at risk economically in a disaster-prone region is a
critical first step to effective mitigation and long-term recovery. Without sustained attention to the
For a case study, see K. Ikeda, 1995, “Gender differences in human loss and vulnerability in natural
disasters: a case study from Bangladesh,” and E. Gomáriz, 1999, Género y Desastres: Introducción
Conceptual y Análisis de Situación.
6
Ikeda, op.cit., p. 188.
7
For one case study, see B. Agarwal, 1990, “Social security and the family: coping with seasonality in
rural India.”
8
Monica Trujillo, Amado Ordonez, and Rafael Hernandez, 2000, Risk-Mapping and Local Capacities:
Lessons from Mexico and Central America, Oxfam Working Paper.
9
Reported by the ILO, 2000, “Programme for Employment Recovery and Reduction of Economic
Vulnerability: A Response to the Floods of Mozambique.”
5
3
impacts of disasters on women and their work, disaster interventions may leave women more, not
less, economically vulnerable to the effects of subsequent disasters. How this occurs, and what
strategies can work against this, is the subject of this paper.
The Economic Impacts of Disasters on Women’s Work: Case Studies
The cultural fiction of women as homemakers and helpmates to male earners ( “the
farmer and his wife”) persists. In fact, women’s daily lives around the world are structured
around a complex web of work and responsibilities—to others in the family and community, to
the household economy, to employers and, for the poorest women, to the natural environment
which supports them.
While rarely conducted with an explicit gender analysis, the case studies cited below
demonstrate that women are indeed major economic, social and political actors in the social crisis
following from severe environmental events. As we might expect, women already on the margins
of survival, who live with the “daily disaster” of poverty before, during, and after these extreme
environmental events we call natural disasters, are those most hard hit and least able to recover.
But how does this happen?
1. Disasters rob women of income
First and most importantly, natural disasters rob women of income. Most striking are the
losses endured by women in lesser developed and resource-dependent countries. Female
agricultural laborers are concentrated at the end of the food processing chain. It was no surprise,
then, that “women in the agro-processing industry in Honduras (particularly bananas) have yet to
return to their jobs while their male counterparts have been employed in construction and
rehabilitation activities.”10 An estimated 3.4% of the entire economically-active female
population of Honduras were thrown out of work by this single event.11 Migrant labor is also
disrupted. Women traveling migrant labor circuits lost work when hurricane Andrew destroyed
local crops traditionally picked by Mexican migrants and when floods destroyed the North
Dakota potato fields worked by migrant workers from Texas.12
In the Indian state of Gujarat, where a catastrophic earthquake occurred in the midst of a
severe and long-lasting drought, women lost work when the gum trees they tapped were toppled;
waged farm workers lost work when local irrigation systems failed; and, paradoxically, women
employed as migratory salt farmers lost work when the quake transformed salt water to fresh in
some places. Women reported in focus groups conducted a month after the quake that
approximately one-third of the field workers and salt farm workers lost work immediately and
were still without income.13 Women lacking land rights or farming small plots are especially
vulnerable and may be forced off the land entirely. For example, Wiest’s study of single mothers
in Bangladesh rearing children on the least desirable river plain chars found that flooding forced
women heading households from bad to worse land and eventually into involuntary low-wage
agricultural labor on local plantations.14
A gender-sensitive ‘social audit’ of the effects of hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua revealed
that women’s employment in income-generating activities declined, especially among
10
P. Delaney and E. Shrader, 2000, Gender and Post-Disaster Reconstruction: The Case of Hurricane
Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua: 21.
11
M. Buvinic, 1999, Hurricane Mitch: Women’s Needs and Contributions.
12
B. H. Morrow and E. Enarson, 1996, “Hurricane Andrew through women’s eyes: issues and
recommendations;” E. Enarson, 2001, “What women do; gendered labor in the Red River Valley flood.”
13
E. Enarson, 2001a, “ ‘We want work:’ rural women in the Gujarat drought and earthquake.”
14
R. Wiest, 1998, “Comparative Perspectives on Household, Gender and Kinship in Relation to Disaster.”
4
wives/partners under the age of 25. 15 In the study of 68 households, the proportion of women
who were earners declined from one-half before the hurricane to less than a third . One year after
hurricane Mitch, many women in two-earner households had not yet returned to paid work;
young wives/partners were especially likely not to have found paid work. This not only reinforced
traditional relationships within the household but left more households in the region dependent on
a single, male earner—arguably far more vulnerable to future economic crises.16 Further, as
spending on children’s health and nutrition tends to decline when women’s income declines, the
capacity of families to survive another year of drought or next year’s flood is reduced.17
The direct effects of natural disasters on women’s employment can also be dramatic in
urban contexts and in highly developed societies. Women tend to dominate as health care
providers, patients, residents, and teachers in such large public facilities as hospitals, nursing
homes and schools. When these public-sector buildings are destroyed or damaged, women may
be killed in large numbers, disabled through injuries, and/or displaced from their own homes to
temporary settlements far from their workplace.
The somewhat less dramatic indirect effects on women’s work may be more costly in the
long run. Women are often employed in the tourist industry along stormy coasts or in service and
retail industries dependent upon high levels of consumption and disposable incomes which will
certainly be constrained by the ripple effects of a flood or cyclone destroying infrastructure,
housing, and workplaces. The Gujarat earthquake destroyed the homes of artisans in Kutch but
also the extended markets through which their products were sold; street vending families in
Ahmedabad, Gujarat were soon unable to obtain the famed Kutch embroidery and faced
substantially reduced incomes. Women in maquilas or cottage industries dependent upon export
production will lose income when a volcanic eruption or severe quake damages or destroys
transportation and communication systems, international commerce, and local markets. Domestic
workers serving private homes are hit by secondary unemployment when their employers flee
their damaged or destroyed homes, as was observed following hurricane Andrew in Miami.
Paradoxically, the provision of no-cost services to disaster victims (e.g. counseling, or temporary
child care) can also deprive women in caregiving fields of much-needed income during the
recovery period.18
From street venders selling homemade foods to home-based service workers and
professionals, women regularly lose income when their homes are flooded, toppled, or burned.
Losing working space, productive assets, health, and time for income-generating work; they must
then spend precious cash or limited credit to make good these losses and buy at market the goods
they formerly produced at home. Damage to homes threatens women’s fundamental human right
to work by destroying their “only natural capital,” particularly for rural and indigenous women
whose home is the primary site over which she exercises some control.19 A report from the
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean following earthquakes in El
Salvador reported high levels of unemployment (85 percent of urban and 64 percent of rural
women) but even greater indirect losses: 20
S. Bradshaw, 2001, “Reconstructing roles and relations: women’s participation in reconstruction in postMitch Nicaragua.”
16
Reduced income implies reduced social power and self-esteem within households, but in Bradshaw’s
study of two-earner households in post-Mitch Nicaragua, no simple equation emerged among women
between their income and their self-regard.
17
See H. Khogali and P. Takhar, 2001, “Empowering women through cash relief in humanitarian
contexts.”
18
B. H. Morrow and E. Enarson, 1996, op.cit.; E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
19
N. Matin, 2002, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development statement for the 46 th Session of
the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
20
Report of the Secretary-General, 2002, “Environmental management and the mitigation of natural
disasters: a gender perspective,” p. 7.
15
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Moreover, 94 percent suffered loss of goods directly linked to income generation and
goods considered women’s property. In view of the household’s key role in social and
economic relations in the community and the high proportion of women with small
businesses in their homes, this loss is significant. Damages to home gardening businesses
(farming, breeding and fruit and vegetables cropping), an important asset in the
subsistence economy, were also high.
The loss of work has more than economic significance. The Self-Employed Women’s
Association website quoted artisans from the hard-hit region of Kutch in northwestern Gujarat
pleading not for emergency relief goods but for supplies to begin sewing again: “Bring us more
work. Only this will help bring normalcy back to our lives and our village. Without work, home
and food, the black day keeps us haunting.” The craft kits women’s organizations provided to
women still displaced in tents was an essential step forward: 21
After the earthquake, the men of the family stopped working. They cannot just go out and
start working, so the women are the only ones who can earn. The men are all in trauma.
The local shopkeepers have stopped giving us food on credit. Now we’re going to earn
every day and buy things every day.
Small-scale and undercapitalized enterprises, often operated by women, are difficult to
sustain in disasters. A study examining women’s economic and social roles following the 1995
Colima, Mexico earthquake included a profile of one woman’s experience. When her home,
doubling as a restaurant, was severely damaged and repairs were slow, she was forced to compete
with many thriving new establishments offering sex and alcohol to single men seeking
construction jobs: “Nobody comes in now as it is so ugly and without music. I don’t have money
to buy groceries and cook them as before. No food, no people.” Another example comes from the
1997 flood along the Canadian/US border, where women reported substantial loss of space,
equipment, supplies, and tools. In North Dakota, a group of family childcare providers estimated
that their preflood earnings had contributed one-third of their total household income before the
flood and virtually nothing after it, due to the location of childcare space in easily flooded
basements. 22 Women employed at home as tutors, piano teachers, beauticians, typists, artists, and
others often reported conflict with men about whether or when to prepare against known hazards
endangering these working spaces. Because men are typically slower to evacuate or take
warnings seriously,23 and women’s homework is devalued, reports of lost work space, tools,
supplies, and equipment were common: 24
[W]hen we heard that Lincoln dike had broke, we all called my sister to say we’d come
over and get trucks and we would move everything out of their home. And [my brotherin-law] just refused. He said, ‘It’s not going to flood. We’re all right.’ He just
absolutely—and she had a business down in her basement and she wanted to get all that
stuff and he just, he refused.
Economic losses can have devastating effects over the long term. The depletion of
household assets is a common survival strategy and key indicator of social crisis. “[T]he assets
which are the first casualty—namely household utensils and jewelry—also happen to be those
typically owned and controlled by women.”25 Property used for dowry payments may well be
lost, marginalizing girls and women left unmarriageable long after the immediate effects of the
disaster recede. At the extreme, protecting small land plots, animals, seeds, or tools costs women
N.Lak, 2002, “Makeshift shops operate among the ruins.”
E. Enarson and J. Scanlon, 1999, “Gender patterns in a flood evacuation: a case study of couples in
Canada’s Red River Valley;” E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
23
See Fothergill, 1996, op.cit.
24
Enarson, 2001, op.cit., p. 13.
25
B. Agarwal, 1990, “Social security and the family: coping with seasonality and calamity in rural India,”
p. 383.
21
22
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their lives: “She was a good woman,” reported a husband whose wife stayed behind and was
killed in a cyclone.26 More often, women may decide against evacuating or taking shelter in order
to protect vital economic resources, as was observed during a cyclone in Bangladesh:27
Very often a woman’s earnings—from agriculture, crop processing, weaving, poultry or
cattle rearing—are a significant portion of the family income. Over and above the
restrictions inherent in purdah, women are often afraid to move to the cyclone shelter
because they fear their homes will be robbed. To start all over again with nothing seems
completely overwhelming. To a very poor woman, the threat of having her home looted
is as ominous as the cyclone itself.
Women’s time and energy for income-generating activities decline when immediate
survival needs and, later, household recovery take precedence. As reported after the Berkeley
wildfires in the United States., women held responsible for managing the socioemotional and
bureaucratic tasks of recovery cut back their working hours or left the paid labor force
temporarily, while men soon returned to paid jobs. 28 Men’s ability to continue paid work to some
degree protects them from the stress of evacuation, displacement, resettlement and
socioemotional recovery. Whether the proximate cause is financial crisis, cutbacks in stateprovided social services, or natural disaster, when local public transportation systems shut down,
childcare centers close, and health services decline, women’s domestic production and family
caregiving are all the more important, even at the cost of earned income.
Household entitlements also come into play following disasters. For example, gender
conflict increased in drought-stricken Zambia over the control of profits from home production:
“Long-term investment strategies from beer sales gave way to short-term subsistence needs. . .
Women, who perceived such income as necessary for the basic social reproduction needs of the
household, found their right to control this income hotly contested by men.” 29 Clearly,
households are not unitary associations in which resources are distributed equally, as relief
agencies often assume. Investigations of famine reveal that women’s bargaining position in the
household weakens as their assets are depleted, their income-earning options inferior, and they
are less mobile, leaving men in crisis a stronger “fall-back position.”30 Most dramatically, girls
and women may eat last and least and be malnourished long before drought reduces the family’s
access to food. During the 1949 Malawi famine, for example, government relief agents reportedly
denied relief to women they simply assumed were or should be supported by husbands, although
most received remittances only rarely. Less likely than men to hold formal-sector jobs, women
also had less claim on food provided by some employers to their workers during the famine.31
To be sure, natural disasters can also increase women’s earnings. Men are highly visible
front-line responders in their jobs as firefighters, elected officials, or certified emergency
manager. Behind the scenes, traditionally-female occupations such as primary school teaching,
counseling, and community work draws many women, especially middle-class women with
professional credentials, into paid disaster work. Their efforts are no less essential than men’s.
An account of home health nurses during a Canadian ice storm points out that visiting home
health nurses provided emergency health care to isolated and frail elderly residents whose needs
might otherwise have gone unnoticed. They were “front-line workers, staffing shelters and health
lines, working endless hours in hospitals and visiting the frail or at-risk—all this despite their own
S. Bari, 1992, “Women in the aftermath,” p. 55.
K. Kabir, 1992, “How women survived,” p. 78.
28
S. Hoffman, 1998, “Eve and Adam among the embers: gender patterns after the Oakland Berkeley
firestorm.”
29
D. Kerner and K. Cook, 1991, “Gender, hunger, and crisis in Tanzania,” p. 265.
30
B. Agarwal, 1990, op.cit., p. 391.
31
M. Vaughan, 1987, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in TwentiethCentury Malawi.
26
27
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problems at home: no power, flooded basements, downed trees, and children off school for who
knows how long.”32 Across the border in the US, part-time nurses in a local hospice program
worked overtime without child care or other support systems to provide uninterrupted medication
and support to terminally ill patients in flooded rural areas.33 Nonetheless, women in these
professions were rarely seen as “disaster workers” needing support from employers. In the
Caribbean, as well, women’s health professions were singled out as an underutilized area of
expertise for disaster response at the technical, professional, and community levels.34
The general observation that households facing economic crisis become more dependent
on women’s incomes is vividly demonstrated in the aftermath of natural disasters.35 Yet a singleminded focus on quantifiable economic changes such as GDP, business closures, or employment
rates, directs attention to the formal economy and the private sector, and hence to men. This
constructs a significant knowledge gap about disasters which robs planners of insight into
women’s vibrant and diverse income-generating strategies, including the extensive economic
activities undertaken by rising numbers and proportions of female household heads around the
globe.
Disasters substantially increase women’s domestic labor
As in armed conflict and other social crises, disrupted working conditions following
disasters do not absolve women from domestic tasks. Writing from South Asia, one observer
remarked: “[T]heir children may have died and their homes and belongings were washed away
but at the end of each day it was the wife/mother who had to cook for whoever survived in the
family.”36 Women must be resourceful, as this account from Bangladesh suggests:37
Nahar had a lot of trouble with cooking. She first tried putting her mud stove (chula) on
the banana tree raft, but when she started cooking the heat from the stove burned the raft.
Then she moved the stove onto a broken wooden chair, but the chair also got burned from
its heat. Finally, she got a broken ‘tin’ pot, set the stove on top of it, put the whole thing
on the raft, where she was then able to cook without worrying.
At the very least, increased caregiving responsibilities, new disaster recovery tasks, and
the urgent need for income lengthens women’s work day. Following the 2001 earthquakes in El
Salvador, women spent from 14-16 hours each day on “emergency and rehabilitation tasks,
including taking care of children and injured, cooking and cleaning the shelter, washing clothes,
carrying water or firewood and queuing for food supplies.”38 Zenaida Delica wrote of the eruption
of Mt. Pinatubo:39
Before the disaster they washed their family’s clothes, but now accept laundry. . .They
not only cook for their families, but also cook to vend on the side. Sometimes they even
work as domestics, extending their responsibilities to others’ homes. They grab relief
agency food or take on cash-for-work or slavish subcontracts just to earn a little more to
fend off hunger. In Pinatubo, where these jobs are the most common sources of income
B. Sibbald, 1998, “RNs unsung heroes during ice storm ’98;” E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
34
See G. Noel, 1998, “The role of women in health-related aspects of emergency management: a
Caribbean perspective” and L. Toscani, 1998 “Women’s roles in natural disaster preparation and aid: a
Central American view.”
35
C. Moser, 1996, “Confronting crisis: a comparative study of household responses to poverty and
vulnerability in four poor urban communities.”
36
S.Bari, 1992, op.cit., p. 58.
37
W. Lovekamp, forthcoming (2003), "Gender and disaster: a synthesis of flood research
in Bangladesh.”
38
Report of the Secretary-General, 2002, op.cit., p. 7.
39
Z. Delica, 1998, “Balancing vulnerability and capacity: women and children in the Philippines,” p. 110.
32
33
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after the disasters, many women become breadwinners. Their husbands are farmers with
no land to till, who look and look for jobs that cannot be found. In addition, many of
these relief agencies seek their assistance packing relief goods, listing beneficiaries, or
delivering health assistance. All this adds work when women have even fewer resources
and facilities than before the disaster struck—no income, poor shelter, very limited water,
few toilets. Yet they are expected to carry out their traditional responsibilities, and more.
Whether in refugee camps, government-provided trailer parks, or the homes of relatives
or strangers, setting up households in temporary accommodations is stressful and timeconsuming. Socially reproductive work becomes more extensive and complex; it may also
become less rewarding, as a woman displaced from her home by the1999 Turkish earthquake
explains:40
We wash, they heat water in a cauldron outside, and take turns in a makeshift bathroom
made up of canvas, stretched around four poles. . . For women, tent life is a particular
ordeal. Even though an army kitchen served meals at the tent villages, many women
attempted to cook on gas stoves. ‘It’s reassuring to make soup for my family,’ Birgul’s
grandmother said. ‘But there’s no fridge, no cupboards and the clean-up takes the whole
day.’ She sighed. ‘It’s impossible to keep clean in a tent. Every day, I feel as if I fail as a
woman.’
The emotional and physical needs of male partners, children, aged relatives, the ill or
disabled, and other dependents are met predominantly by women before, during, and after
disasters. These responsibilities increase dramatically, even as newer forms of disaster work arise
and women seek out new ways to earn income. Not only is it more difficult to meet the
immediate needs of family members without transportation, clean water, functioning shops or
schools and so forth, but these survivors may now have urgent needs for medical care, clothing,
shelter, schooling, and emotional support. Responding to the social-psychological needs of
children, mediating household conflicts, devising alternative school lessons and tending wounds
of all kinds soon becomes women’s work. The passing and burial of family members engages
both women and men but women often carry major responsibilities.
Domestic work also expands simply because households change in size and structure.
Female headship often increases in the wake of natural disasters, sometimes dramatically, though
long-term shifts in household structure have not been studied over time. The postdisaster “flight
of men” is well-documented following Bangladeshi cyclones and the 1949 Malawi drought; a
year after Mitch, Honduran relief workers reported that half the households still in shelter were
maintained solely by women and in Nicaraguan, 40 percent.41 Women’s dependent care
responsibilities make them less mobile than men and less able to migrate outside the impacted
area to earn income.
Households may increase in size after a natural disasters, as they do in other forms of
social crises when family resources are consolidated. Displaced kin will be taken in when
possible, as in Gujarat following the quake when urban relatives returned from the devastation in
cities to the relative safety of their home villages in the district of Surendranagar. 42 Whether
children are orphaned in slow-motion through the HIV/AIDS pandemic or in a cataclysmic
landslide, grandmothers and other extended family members do what they can. HelpAge
International reports that in Southern Africa, where many nations are threatened not only by
HIV/AIDS and heavy debt loads but also by flooding and drought, older women play a critical
role though their own domestic labor late in life expands: “It is common for grandmothers to be
U. Reinart, 1999, “Of diapers and tampons: women and the earthquake.”
See R. Wiest, 1998, “Comparative perspectives on household, gender and kinship in relation to
disaster,” M. Vaughan, 1987, op.cit., and P. Delaney and E. Shrader, 2000, op.cit.
42
This contrasts with the decline in household size under drought conditions, when Surendranager villagers
migrated to cities to seek work. See E. Enarson, 2001a, op.cit.
40
41
9
tending 4-5 grandchildren who have no parents. It is not unusual for ten or more children and
adolescents to be under their care.” In southern Sudan, agency researchers found that “older
women have particular skills in finding ‘wild’ food to feed themselves and their dependants” but
these important skills are not seen as disaster relief.43
Disasters undermine women’s social protection
The social exclusion and lack of social protection experienced by girls and women before
natural disasters are exacerbated during periods of social crisis. Disproportionately represented
among people with chronic health problems and disabilities, and in need of regular reproductive
health care, women are that much more at risk when health facilities and services are disrupted.
Women disaster survivors also tend more often than men to report symptoms of postdisaster
stress.44 Lack of reproductive health care and exposure to violence are common in the
“temporary”settlements which may house girls and women for years following social crises such
as armed conflict and environmental degradation leading to natural disasters.45
Women and girls are also reportedly more exposed to sexual and domestic violence in
disaster contexts. 46Yet safe shelters for abused women, where they exist, are subject to damage
and closure, as are informal networks of support. Women seeking shelter during cyclones have
been exposed to sexual harassment and assault.47 Concerns were raised that children misidentified
as cyclone ‘orphans’ were trafficked into sex work following the Orissa cyclone and the Gujarat
earthquake.48 In Kafi’s ethnographic study of girls and women impoverished by South Asian
cyclones and floods, lack of protection from male relatives for widows and other sole women was
cited as one of the factors increasing the rate and fear of sexual assault.49 Girls in families forced
by the losses of drought or cyclone to sell off dowry possessions may well be forced into early
marriage and child labor increases when hard-hit families must send all members of the
household out to work.
Schools and childcare centers, health clinics, outreach literacy, health, and nutrition
programs, community organizations, neighborhood centers, and governmental initiatives
supporting women at the neighborhood level are all vital protections supporting women and their
work. After the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, village women in focus groups described the social
supports they lost in addition to income, including disruptions in the delivery of bulk food
supplies provided by the Self-Employed Women’s Association and closed health clinics, schools,
and child care centers.50
Caregiving systems creatively pieced together, generally relying more on family
networks than support from governments or employers, unravel quickly in natural disasters.
When children, the disabled, or the frail elderly are cared for in private residences or in group
homes, housing loss may permanently destroy vital informal caregiving systems. Caring for
children in emergencies is a major concern for women around the world. In the urban United
“Southern Africa—the Threat of Famine,” 2002.
For a review and case study from the US, see M. Van Willigen, 2001, “Do disasters affect individuals’
psychological well-being? An over-time analysis of the effect of hurricane Floyd on men and women in
Eastern North Carolina.”
45
League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1991, Working with Women in
Emergency Relief and Rehabilitation Programme.
46
For a survey and case study, see E. Enarson, 1999a, “Violence against women in disasters: a study of
domestic violence programs in the United States and Canada. ”
47
For one account among many see R. Shaw, 1992, ‘Nature’, ‘culture’ and disasters: floods and gender in
Bangladesh.” .
48
ActionAid, 2001, “India earthquake update.”
49
S. Kafi, 1992, Disasters and Destitute Women: Twelve Case Studies.
50
E. Enarson, 2001a, op.cit.
43
44
10
States, business leaders, elected officials, employed mothers, and childcare advocates concurred
that business recovery was delayed due to the flooding of home childcare providers’ homes and
flooded childcare centers following the 1997 Red River Valley flood. Thousands of employed
women were unable to return to paid work in female-dominated sectors such as banking and
insurance (both vital to immediate flood recovery) as well as education, health care, and social
services. 51 Temporary shelters may house displaced residents for months or even years yet not
be sited near major employers of women, public transportation lines, or child care centers.
The often conflicting demands of paid work and family responsibility may be acute in the
case of natural disaster.52 In severely damaged homes and worksites, women work hard hours to
restore healthful conditions. For the employed, overtime is often required to restore essential
organizational systems, and longer and more difficult commutes are common. Family help is
certainly welcome but not all women can turn to their families. This Scottish mother could no
longer help her daughter when the two families were placed in separate temporary
accommodations:53
[She] is out working, she had to go back to work because her boss didn’t believe that we
were flooded out. . . She had five days to get everything sorted out and to get back to
work. Otherwise she would have been sacked. . . She had to get back and I had to take the
we’un [grandchild] everywhere that I went.
Employers provide varying levels of support to workers during natural disasters and other
social crises. In the US Red River Valley flood, 54 many public and some private employers
provided continuous salary and benefits for several weeks while workplaces remained closed, but
this important benefit was less available to working-class women in low-wage manual jobs, parttime workers, and women in the informal sector. Flextime and flexplace policies, again more
available to professional women employed in universities and state bureaucracies, helped women
do their jobs and still complete the flood of paperwork, meet insurance adjusters at home, or take
children to see counselors.
Social insurance through employers or government is not the norm for women before
disasters nor can disaster-impacted women rely upon it after losing a home to a forest fire or their
crops to a flood. SEWA’s response to the Gujarat earthquake demonstrated the significance of
increased social support. Their relief work included livelihood reconstruction, new childcare
centers, opportunities for social dialogue, and social insurance. Two months after the quake, they
reported: 55
The massive and unimaginable destruction, the loss that the village communities have
suffered, has really made them realize the importance and need for appropriate social
security. Dhanima in Surendranagar district says ‘It was just a matter of 2 minutes. We
lost the entire life’s savings – all of our assets. There is no support system, on which we
can fall back. We feel very vulnerable.’ Reports Paluben from the same villages ‘Now I
realize the importance of savings. It I had a savings account of my own – at least I had
some security and support’. . . Everyday, the organizers and the district offices are
flooded by groups of village women and men, wanting to open their village savings
groups, wanting to join SEWA’s Insurance Programme. As a result, 435 new savings and
51
E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
Work and family conflicts have generally been studied to determine whether male emergency workers
abandon vital jobs to care for their families in a crisis. As women’s behind-the-scenes family labor plays an
important enabling function for predominantly male emergency responders and supports community
reconstruction, women’s work and family conflicts in disasters warrant more attention.
53
M. Fordham and A. Ketteridge, 1998, “Men must work and women must weep: examining gender
stereotypes in disasters,” p. 86.
54
E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
55
See SEWA’s website for detailed accounting of livelihood losses and reconstruction
(http://earthquake.sewa.org). SEWA was also active following urban riots in Ahmedabad.
52
11
credit groups have been formed, with 9190 new members and Rs. 5,65,460 savings.
Similarly 20,000 new members from the villages have come forward to join the Insurance
programme. Within two weeks of the earthquake, SEWA’s insurance team had surveyed
over 2,500 insured members claims of damage and asset loss, mainly destruction of
houses. Working closely with the local associations in the three worst affected districts,
the insurance team carefully documented asset losses and has almost completed the
processing of claims.
The social insurance offered by this registered trade union specifically recognizes the
threat that natural disasters and urban disturbances pose to women in the informal sector. Women
around the world women need just this kind of social support, as they do family-friendly work
policies, health care, childcare assistance, and related social policies supporting them in their
roles as emergency responders and rebuilders.
Women’s voluntary work expands
Everything undone by wild winds or raging waters must be redone, always quickly and
often urgently. Old jobs (clearing roads, rebuilding wells, caring for the sick and injured,
preparing food) and new (seeking our relief workers, assessing damages, saving trapped victims,
relocating communities) tax women and men of all ages and cultures.
Largely unpaid and often socially invisible, women’s voluntary work following disasters
is multifaceted, as this account from Nicaragua suggests: 56
After the storm subsided, international aid began entering the area near her village. She
saw that the village leader, a man who lost his farm, was more concerned about his own
than other village members. . .So she traveled to the mayor’s office, where she had never
been before. She visited the Peace Corps volunteer in town, whom she did not know.
Through her dedication, persistence, and patience, she had seven houses built and legally
put in the wife/mother’s name. She insisted that latrines be built for all families. She
rallied 10,000 trees to be planted on the deforested hills that surrounded her village. She
learned about water diversion tactics, and found an engineer to teach her village to build
gavion-walled channels.
Long before the environmental events we call disasters unfold, women’s everyday
activities impact local environmental resources.57 When possible, women help mitigate
environmental hazards and reduce disasters by using the skills and knowledge derived from their
role as resource users, managers, and conservers. Non-structural mitigation strategies have long
been adapted by women agriculturalists. Their “technological innovations” in the face of drought
or floods, for example, include building raised homes and miniature levees, adjusting the varieties
of rice they plant to the type and severity of floods, planting fast-growing seedlings to take
advantage of soils created by routine flooding, preserving seeds, and adopting water-conserving
agricultural techniques, among others.58 Women in the Banaskantha region of India developed
collectives to plant and protect livestock fodder during droughts, thereby protecting their income
source and enhancing food security. This enables them to rely less on outside relief and more on
community capacities, and also reduces male migration with its corresponding pressures on
56
Contribution by S. Henshaw of the World Food Program to the internet conference on Gender Equality,
Environmental Management and Natural Disaster Mitigation sponsored by Division for the Advancement
of Women, November 2001.
57
The emphasis here is on how women conserve resources and mitigate hazards but this is not always
possible. For a fuller discussion, see the on-line discussion cited above.
58
See M. Chowdhury, 2001, “Women’s technological innovations and adaptations for disaster mitigation: a
case study of charlands in Bangladesh;” and W. Lovekamp, forthcoming, op.cit.
12
women.59 Elsewhere, women are centrally involved in early warning systems such as monitoring
river water levels. Their activities in Las Masicas, Honduras were widely regarded as the reason
for low death rates during hurricane Mitch.60 Other examples come from landslide-prone parts
of Peru, where “[m]en and women worked together to produce risk maps, build retaining walls
and design water systems for tree plantations that would reduce the impact of slides.”61
Emergency preparedness against known hazards also becomes women’s work—as
mothers, teachers, and community educators.62 Women on El Niño task forces in Hawaii
developed public education and awareness programs aimed at isolated villages to mitigate the
effects of the El Niño drought; campaigning to treat suspect groundwater before drinking, they
helped reduce the incidence of reported diarrheal disease significantly. In Brazil, women educate
one another about emergency preparedness through women-owned and operated radio programs.
Another example of women’s preparedness activities comes from Egypt, where the World Health
Organization worked through tenants’ associations in the slums of Alexandria to select and train
young women as “environmental promoters.” Trained by environmental scientists, these young
women took on the roles of “educating community members about urban flooding, waste water
management and other issues. Women were also instrumental in community and school-based
preparedness education following Armenia’s destructive 1988 Spitak earthquake. A small group
of women scientists voluntarily undertook to train primary and middle-school teachers and pupils
in seismic protection skills (“don’t be scared, be prepared!”), designed mass media campaigns
highlighting women’s roles in disasters, and helped local governments plan for coordinated
quake response.
As noted earlier, researchers consistently find women more motivated than men to take
protective action in disaster contexts. Women in good health and not limited by family
responsibilities are generally involved in physically protecting homes and businesses, for
example, constructing dikes and sandbagging in a flood. There is ample evidence that women
also participate in debris removal , clean up, and household repairs to help restore homes and
neighborhoods. Women’s disaster work inevitably includes emergency relief, again belying
media images of women as tearful and passive actors sidelined by professional emergency
managers, outside humanitarian organizations, and male-dominated search-and-rescue attempts.
Indeed, an early study of a maritime explosion in Halifax, Canada, found women provided
emergency assistance to the injured well before official male responders arrived, 63 as they did in
Turkey’s 1988 Spitak quake, when girls and young women were credited with locating over
70,000 displaced persons.64
Women are heavily involved in relief efforts as applicants and distributors of emergency
goods and services. Except where norms of sex segregation are enforced,65 women tend to bear
primary responsibility for seeking out what emergency relief assistance is available to residents
caught up in natural disasters. This work involves long waiting periods in public spaces; often in
the company of small children. Provisions for childcare in relief efforts are rare both for
M. Bhatt, 1997, “Maintaining families in drought India: the fodder security system of the Banaskantha
women. “
60
M. Buvinic, 1999, Hurricane Mitch: Women’s Needs and Contributions.
61
Reported in N. Domeisen, 1998, “Community life and disaster reduction,” p. 3.
62
The examples provided below are drawn from contributions to the internet conference on Gender
Equality, Environmental Management and Natural Disaster Mitigation, and from papers prepared for the
Expert Working Group meeting conducted in Ankara, Turkey (November 2001).
63
J. Scanlon, citing S. Prince, 1998, “The perspective of gender: a missing element in disaster response.”.
64
R.A. Ayvazova and B.V. Mehrabian, 1995, “Post-disaster initiatives in traditional society: Armenian
women after ‘Spitak’ earthquake,” p. 13. Specific examples of women’s emergency relief activities are
provided, among many other sources, in IDNDR, 1995, “Women and children: keys to prevention.”
65
R. Kabir, 1995, “Bangladesh: surviving the cyclone is not enough.”
59
13
applicants and for those who volunteer to help distribute goods and services. It may also involve
extensive paperwork and the stigma of welfare.
Women’s voluntary disaster work is perhaps most important during the long
reconstruction process when the economic interests of women and men are so easily confounded.
Skills training to help women take advantage of postdisaster work is a major focus. In Honduras,
the coordinator of a sustainable development network mobilized international networks of
support through the internet, matching specific needs on the ground to available relief supplies.
Her core group of 100 volunteers subsequently obtained outside funding for computers and skills
training for nearly 800 people to help reduce their isolation and build new communication
networks for future social crises.66
Skills training in construction are particular concerns of women volunteering after
disasters. In Jamaica, a women’s housing cooperative “dedicated to improvement of urban slums
based on self-help and local construction material” was so effective that its members were asked
to help rebuild houses in Mexico after the 1985 earthquake here women quickly organized around
lack of housing and employment assistance from the Mexican government.67 Similarly, SEWA
capitalized on its existing housing program and its connection with the Disaster Mitigation
Institute to involve women in rebuilding homes after the 2001 earthquake. Earlier, a women’s
collective in India had also trained its members to work construction jobs and promoted disasterresistant construction techniques following the Latur earthquake:68
Theirs has been an inspiring saga of the strength and energy of women’s groups here.
Wherever they have worked, the rate of completion of houses has been very successful.
These women talk knowledgeably about beams, lintel, plinth, brackets, retrofitting and
related technical terms. They can say whether a house has been constructed properly.
They have designed their own houses with modifications.
This network of women’s group (Swayam Shikshan Prayog, or SSP) collaborated with
SEWA and other women’s groups to promote women’s training and employment in the Gujarat
earthquake as well. The SSP initiated an innovative four-year partnership with government in
Maharashtra to oversee and direct housing reconstruction in 500 villages. Perhaps more
importantly, the SSP initiated information-sharing visits about gender issues in disasters for
women in India and Turkey, working through a local women’s NGO, the Foundation for the
Support of Women’s Work (FSWW). This group took an active part in reconstruction following
the Marmara earthquake, by conducting their own needs assessments, constructing children’s and
women’s centers, advocating for construction jobs and training for women and generally making
women’s immediate needs and long-term interests visible. The Gujarat Disaster Watch, a womanled and user-oriented monitoring project followed, beginning with a workshop of 175 grassroots
women who survived these major earthquakes. Women evaluated both their own and their
government’s disaster responses. One of their strong recommendations was for governments and
outside groups to actively partner with community-based organizations; another called for
strengthening and expanding women’s local savings and credit groups.69
Grassroots mobilization around disaster issues can be the platform for broader
mobilization by women, as occurred following the 1985 earthquake that devastated downtown
“Unsung heroines: women and natural disasters,” 2000 (January).
D. Pastizzi-Ferencic, 1998, “Disaster management, women: an asset or a liability?”
68
M. Krishnaraj, 1997, “Gender issues in emergency management: the Latur earthquake,” p. 408.
69
For information on these initiatives in India and Turkey, see S. Akçar, “Grassroots women’s collectives:
roles in postdisaster effort, potential for sustainable partnership and good governance,” and P. Gopalan,
“Responding to earthquakes: people’s participation in reconstruction and rehabilitation,” both presented to
the Expert Working Group meeting in Ankara (2001). For information on the Gujarat disaster watch, see
the Huairou Commission report to the Panel on Gender Equality, Environmental Management, and Natural
Disaster Mitigation conducted in the 46th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women.
66
67
14
Mexico City. Two days after the quake, women from 42 factories created the September 19
Garment Workers Union, which became the first independent union to be recognized by the
government in over a decade. As survivor Guadalupe Conde reflected:70
The seamstresses were thrown into the street. I myself had no work. When I finished my
trip through the zone where all the sweatshops had fallen, I arrived by chance at San
Antonio Abad and I began helping out. I did what I could to move the debris; at first, no
one helped. Then we began to join together as workers. We began to talk. We conceived
of a union because we needed to defend ourselves, and I believe that we are going to
succeed.
Case studies often find women active behind the scenes in community-building efforts
designed to increase community solidarity and promote long-term recovery. 71 Sometimes these
are cultural celebrations. Haitian women in Miami, for instance, organized a spring cultural
celebration six months after Hurricane Andrew devastated their Miami neighborhood. Women
frequently interpret disasters culturally, using quilting, poetry and music to help people and
communities make sense of catastrophe. An Australian researcher made the key point in summing
up women’s work after a bushfire:72
[Women] also often took responsibility for decision-making, community planning, and
the reconstruction of homes. Many helped organize fairs, dances, and other ways of
raising community morale. In their vital but unsung roles, women rewove the fabric of
their communities while men rebuilt the structure.
Keep the Window of Opportunity Open for Women
Natural disasters are inherently disempowering and especially so for women whose
control over vital resources and decisions is further eroded. But response and reconstruction also
afford unparalleled opportunities for social transformation through the expansion of women’s
opportunities for decent work and full social participation. The authors of a major report on
hurricane Mitch in Central America made this point but also offered a cautionary note: 73
Women reported that their husbands are listening to their opinions more than they did
prior to Hurricane Mitch. They attributed this change to the “public” work that they did
during the disaster. . . In places where they were not excluded from doing so by some
NGOs and agencies, women are receiving capacity-building in a range of non-traditional
activities including: masonry, carpentry, plumbing, agricultural extension, and natural
resource management/forestry. Some accounts further report that some men are fulfilling
social roles previously performed by women, including gardening, food preparation and
water provision. . . While women often resist a return to previous, usually subservient,
economic and social roles, men generally favor such a process. Conflict may ensue and
should be considered carefully when social transformation is a stated aim.
Short-term social changes are not uncommon in the immediate aftermath of social crises
like war or natural disasters, though the gender-based division of labor filters most of women’s
and men’s activities in emergencies. The conditions for far-reaching and sustained changes in
gender relations may also be present. Sometimes these arise as unanticipated consequences, as
occurred when a relief agency in the drought-stricken Sudan employed educated young women as
recorders on a survey project, and found two years later that more girls attended school because
Interviewed by S. Lovera , 1987, “Sew be it,” p. 6.
Among others, see H. Cox, 1998, “Women in bushfire territory;” E. Enarson and B.H. Morrow, “Women
will rebuild Miami;” E. Enarson, 2000, “ ‘We will make meaning out of this:’ women’s cultural responses
to the Red River Valley flood;” and E. Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
72
H. Cox, op.cit., p. 142.
73
P. Delaney and E. Shrader, 2000, op.cit., p. 28 .
70
71
15
their parents now viewed them as potential earners. Similarly, a CARE program working with
widows in Afghanistan after a cyclone found that women not only planted the trees they were
given but also starting savings accounts and became involved in more social activities through
community groups.74
But sustained changes in gender relations are certainly more likely when responding
organizations in the private and public sectors incorporate women’s empowerment as a long-term
goal in disaster response and reconstruction. One example among many comes from Pakistan and
the flood relief of the NGO Pattan.75 First, Pattan staff used the knowledge they had gained about
regional gender issues to plan both short-term relief and long-term vulnerability reduction. The
recruited women relief workers and supported then with transportation, housing, and security
assistance in this highly segregated society. Women survivors were actively involved in food
distribution and households needing assistance were registered in women’s names; Pattan also
encouraged the formation of separate women’s and men’s village committees, seeking to increase
women’s decision-making more than their workload. All new homes built with Pattan’s help were
jointly deeded and illiterate women were trained in record-keeping and cash management skills.
Not only new houses, but increased self-esteem resulted over time, “which is an important step
toward women’s ability to take control of their own lives, decreasing vulnerability in times of
crisis.”76
Not an outside group but a local NGO played this role on the island of Montserrat, when
volcanic eruptions were displacing and impoverishing women. The women’s group Women on
the Move found new purpose by addressing women’s needs for work, offering skills training in
traditional and nontraditional fields to very diverse women temporarily “thrown together in
shelter,” in order to increase earning opportunities on male-dominated construction sites. They
sought to reduce barriers among women, modeled consensual decision-making, and challenged
women to use the disaster as a window of opportunity to “enter into new relationships with their
men and the society in which they live.77 Deliberate efforts to foster social change were made in
Nicaragua as well, where the NGO Puntos de Encuentro organized village workshops after
Hurricane Mitch asking men to consider that ‘violence against women is one disaster men can
prevent.78
Many models for promoting long-term change (and many examples of failure) are
evident after natural disasters. Following a hurricane in Miami and an earthquake in Armenia,
local women organized new groups to meet women’s short-term needs and promote their longterm strategic interests.79 In Miami, when women’s and children’s needs were consistently
ignored by the male-dominated group nominated to distribute relief monies, a coalition of dozens
of women’s groups formed Women Will Rebuild. This group mobilized to secure women a place
on the male-dominated executive board and redirect l0% of all donated funds to women’s
economic recovery, antiviolence services, youth recreation , child care, housing and other
concerns. Not their practical gains but their political mobilization and new-found solidarity will
increase the resilience of Miami women in the next hurricane. Women on the Move, an action
group formed in Armenia to use women’s skills as communicators and parents, played a similar
role and created many new opportunities for women as recognized preparedness educators.
74
Both examples are reported in M. Anderson and P. Woodrow, 1989, Rising from the Ashes: Developing
Strategies in Times of Disaster.
75
F. Bari, 1998, “Gender, disaster, and empowerment: a case study from Pakistan.”
76
Ibid., p.131.
77
J. Soares and A. Mullings, forthcoming, ‘A we run tings’: women rebuilding Montserrat.’.
78
See P. Delaney and E. Shrader, 2000, op.cit.; and the Gender and Natural Disasters Fact Sheet developed
by the Pan-American Health Organization (www.paho.org).
79
E. Enarson and B. H. Morrow, 1998, “Women will rebuild Miami”, op.cit., and A. Mikayelyan,
“Earthquake mitigation from a gender perspective in Armenia.” .
16
How can these possibilities for social transformation be realized? In the final section of
this chapter, I suggest the following. First, women’s economic recovery must be a priority, with
sustained and integrated attention to women’s work in disaster mitigation, preparedness, relief,
and reconstruction activities. Secondly, we must expand our knowledge base about women as
economic and social actors in disaster contexts, with attention to how long-term changes can be
sustained. Third, advocacy is needed to promote and implement organizational change, including
change in the workplace cultures of disaster-responding agencies toward a more holistic and
prevention-oriented approach. The social dialogue around disasters must be broadened to
successfully integrate the intersecting goals of gender equality, sustainable development and
disaster reduction. In the discussion below, I draw extensively on the ILO’s responses to crisis
and highly gender-sensitive reconstruction strategies to make these points.
Make women’s economic recovery a priority
As the ILO insists, labor-intensive responses to disaster which target those who are most
vulnerable economically can help move communities out of crisis and also reduce vulnerability to
extreme environmental events certain to occur in the future. Steady employment is consistently
identified as a primary factor in postdisaster recovery, 80but women generally are less likely than
men to have steady jobs or be able to keep them in crisis. Job loss, reduced income, expanded
workloads, and difficult working conditions at home and in the workplace make economic
recovery from disasters slow and uncertain, especially for women. Efforts to rebuild equitably
will fall far short if these realities are not addressed. Again, hurricane Mitch is illustrative: 81
Some are reporting that women, who typically have smaller plots and less access to
extension services and credit, are “dropping out” of agricultural production post-Mitch.
In the worst cases, the topsoil was completely washed away and replaced with sand and
rocks from mudslides. In these instances, women, who are less mobile than men and
more socially and culturally constrained to remain in their place of origin, may suffer
greater negative consequences than men, who appear to be out-migrating from those
areas which suffered the most topsoil damage. Most women in Somotillo, Nicaragua,
reported that they were unable or unwilling to leave their other responsibilities (e.g. child
care, community work) to search for other work. They also expressed a belief that jobs
outside the community would be more difficult for unskilled women to find than for men.
Income support for impacted workers enhances long-term recovery and increases morale.
When women’s work across all sectors and in the household is recognized and socially
valued, it necessarily becomes a priority during reconstruction. The ILO’s response to the 2001
Indian earthquake is a case in point. Gender experts and rapid assessment teams developed a
model program for the rehabilitation of 10 villages in Kutch, implementing their work through
existing partnerships with SEWA, a well-established NGO and registered trade union serving
women in the informal sector. Craftswomen in the area benefited from the ILO/SEWA
collaboration, which offered “temporary cottage industry production cum training centres;
community fodder banks; skills training, including both craft and construction skills, and a model
training cum demonstration site for earthquake resistant housing.” 82 Responding to the Chokwe
district during extensive flooding in Mozambique, the ILO again targeted women when it was
evident that the heavily-female sectors of agriculture and small trade had been extensively
damaged. Women traders and farmers were not simply given relief assistance but directly
engaged in the ILO’s labor-intensive programming. Of those directly benefiting from ILO
See R. Bolin and P. Bolton, 1983, “Recovery in Nicaragua and the USA.”
P. Delaney and E. Shrader, 2000, op.cit., p. 22.
82
Crisis-Affected Peoples and Countries, ILO’s Operational Activities (Mid-1997 – March 2001), p.55.
80
81
17
initiatives (e.g., relocating markets, vocational training, restoring livestock) the great majority
(87%) were women.83
Lowering barriers to women in postdisaster paid relief work is also important. Investment
strategies focusing on physical reconstruction are likely to generate jobs for men at the expense of
social reconstruction programs likely to employ more women. Investment is needed in projects
promoting human and social recovery which tend to employ women in female-dominated
education, health, social, and human service fields. Male earners universally benefit more than
women from construction-oriented reconstruction; for example, in Nicaragua after hurricane
Mitch, an estimated 60 % of these jobs went to men.84 To support their long-term economic
recovery, women as well as men must have access to reconstruction jobs, investment funds, and
income-generating projects. Careful monitoring is needed to ensure that food-for-work projects,
for example, do not add to women’s already-expanded work loads without developing their skills
or capacities. There were “myriad accounts from NGOs of ‘volunteer’ unremunerated work being
assigned to women in order to guarantee payment to men” in food-for-work rehabilitation
programs in Central America. 85
Making women’s economic recovery a priority also means lowering barriers to women as
emergency relief workers and to female professional/technical emergency specialists. On the first
point, it must be understood that while disaster survivors have many needs in common, some are
gender-specific. Many women will need culturally- appropriate clothing and hygiene supplies,
safe transportation, nutritional supplements, childcare to reach relief centres, antiviolence
services, and gender-sensitive mental and physical health care. Ensuring that both women and
men serve on relief teams, as feasible and appropriate across cultures, makes gender-fair
intervention more likely. In Iran, among other places in the Islamic world, relief teams operated
by the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society now include women so female survivors can more freely
discuss their needs.86 Woman-to-woman assistance also proved effective in Bangladesh, where
strong social norms kept women out of distribution lines for emergency help: “This was
especially true for building materials—perhaps because women had to look after their children
and could not spend time at distribution centres. When strong purdah was prevalent women
would not go to the centres or stand in line to receive relief.” 87 Female relief workers, too, face
similar constraints: 88
As a woman, I faced a shock along with my female colleagues when we were told that we
could not accompany the relief mission with the visiting team because there was no
guarantee of any “secure” place to stay. . . We learned form other NGOs that they sent
mainly male relief teams. This may have been unintentional but indicated that women
were seen more as victims and not as providers of services during and after disasters.
Female emergency managers are employed in very small numbers and generally in sexstereotyped positions, although the skills and perspectives they bring have much to offer disaster
responding agencies. Training and employing women professionals in disaster preparedness and
response is vital; retaining them in organizations often characterized by militaristic, maledominated “command and control” cultures poses a real challenge.89 As on-the-ground relief
83
The Mozambique Floods: The ILO Rapid Response, p. 3.
M. Buvinic, 1999, op.cit., p. 5.
85
P. Delaney and E. Shrader, 2000, op.cit., p. 22.
86
C. Oxlee, 2000, “Beyond the veil: women in Islamic National Societies.”
87
K. Kabir, 1992, “How women survived,” p. 79.
88
F. Akhter, 1992, “Women are not only victims,” p. 60.
89
Among others, see S. Gibbs, 1990, Women’s Role in the Red Cross/Red Crescent; R. Begum, 1993,
“Women in environmental disasters: the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh:” R. Wraith, 1998, “Women in
disaster management: where are they?;” and J. Wilson, 1999, “Professionalization and gender in local
emergency management,” as well as contributions to the 2001 on-line discussion sponsored by the Division
for the Advancement of Women.
84
18
workers or behind-the-scenes emergency managers, women can potentially serve as welcome role
models to others and help other women, too, take the “first step towards more empowering
gender equations” in disasters. 90
Further promoting long-term economic recovery are gender-smart initiatives by work
organizations in hazard-prone regions to increase emergency preparedness. Family-friendly
policies such as child care will especially benefit working parents struggling to respond to crisis.
In a US flood, one manager in a state agency immediately brought in trailers and staff to provide
on-site childcare for her predominantly female staff who were heavily impacted by the flood but
also needed at work to assist others. 91 While her on-the-spot decision helped, contingency
planning to provide childcare to women in emergency relief roles would have helped more.
Business contingency planning can reduce the impacts of extreme events on workers and their
families, minimize employment losses and personal injury rates, decrease service interruptions to
impacted residents, and help maintain workplace health and safety standards. Currently, most
business contingency planning reflects the concerns of private enterprise and large businesses.
However, gender-sensitive emergency preparedness is needed in all organizations employing
large numbers of women and/or providing essential social services. Hospitals, schools,
community clinics, childcare centers, and grassroots agencies providing services to senior or
disabled women, women immigrants, or women subject to violence especially need familyfriendly emergency plans, as their services are likely to be in greater demand after a natural
disaster.92 Flextime and flexplace options, counseling, on-site child care, respite care for
overburdened caregivers, and other services available through employers will help disasterimpacted workers and their families recover.
Worker and employer associations should collaborate as they develop hazard mitigation
and emergency preparedness plans. Some ad hoc projects will be successful, as were the
postflood North Dakota workshops organized by an outside relief agency for employers and
workers to share information about relief assistance, workplace repairs, health concerns in
damaged workplaces (e.g. mold, toxic fumes, noise), and emotional aspects of recovery. 93 A
workers’ association of small businesswomen in the US also developed an ad-hoc response to
hurricane Andrew in Miami, helping their members find temporary work space, replace business
equipment, and meet family needs as well. But the second step they took, to create a revolving
disaster fund for future recovery grants to disaster-impacted members, will surely strengthen
bonds between women more and provide more sustained recovery assistance. 94 As cited above,
social insurance schemes such as SEWA’s disaster insurance for informal-sector women
employed at home can be an important step toward disaster recovery for women.
Women’s enterprises must be protected as the esteem accorded men’s activities and their
presumed role as household heads fosters a climate where they are easily overlooked in recovery
planning. Insurance checks and government relief checks were written in the male partner’s name
after the Berkeley-Oakland wildfire in California and Hurricane Andrew in Miami, for example.95
Gender bias in investment policies can deter women’s recovery. One early study found that the
Small Business Administration awarded loans disproportionately to male-owned businesses after
US disasters; yet women-owned businesses often fail in disasters, as many did after the 1997 Red
J. D’Cunha, 1997, “Foregrounding gender concerns in emergency management.”
E.Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
92
For discussion of the need to prepare for increased violence against women, see E. Enarson, 1999, op.cit.,
and J. Wilson et al.,1998, “Domestic violence after disaster.” .
93
E.Enarson, 2001, op.cit.
94
E. Enarson and B.H. Morrow, 1997, “A gendered perspective: the voices of women.”
95
S. Hoffman, 1998, op.cit.
90
91
19
River floods.96 There are also indications that micro-credit NGOs offering loans to low-income
women did not defer payments, for example when floods in Bangladesh restricted women’s sale
of vegetables, sugar cane, clothes, and other goods, but still expected women to meet their loan
obligations. Some turned to relatives or loan sharks, incurring increased debt which can only
reduce their capacity to recover from the next flood. 97
When women lose productive land, household space for micro-business, transportation to
a full-time job, childcare, time for rebuilding a small business, assets they brought to their
marriage, and perhaps their health, their resilience to future disasters is compromised. Disaster
recovery understood simply as the restoration of the status quo ante does not promote long-term
recovery so much as it reconstructs gendered vulnerability to future disasters. Integrating gender
analysis into the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of post-disaster employment
projects is essential to ensure women and men equal opportunities for decent work.
Learn from disasters through action research
Understanding the kinds of work and employment issues facing women is vital for full
economic recovery, but many questions remain unasked and unanswered. Gender-specific data at
the household level and across sectors and occupational groups are sorely needed. Regarding
women’s vulnerability, local planners and disaster agencies also need basic information about
household structure, gender divisions of labor, specific factors increasing women’s economic
insecurity, working conditions for women in major industries and occupations, barriers to
women’s control over land and other economic assets, and the particular needs of home-based
workers, women with disabilities, migrant workers, sole providers, and women operating small
businesses. Regarding women’s capacities, information is needed about women’s work skills,
their social and organizational networks, and the resources of women workers’ associations and
cooperatives. Planners should identify the key groups of women whose local knowledge,
community languages, social networks, and insight into community history will be useful after
disasters. Hard-won lessons from parallel situations such as refugee camps must be appreciated,
for example the need to avoid disempowering women by according men control over
traditionally-female tasks and resources.
Researchers should recognize that women’s and men’s accounts of work in disasters may
vary as the gendered division of labor situates them differently as economic actors and expert
observers. In one recent study, Nicaraguan women involved in coffee bean harvesting estimated
hurricane crop losses higher than men, to whom these losses were less visible because most of
their own work came later in the production process. 98 If women are not active partners in needs
assessments, important opportunities may be overlooked. Toward this end, Oxfam ensured that
Nicaraguan women’s garden plots were included as a unit of analysis in vulnerability maps,
recognizing that homestead gardening plays a large, though often neglected, role in disaster
mitigation. This is because homestead production provides a relatively stable and diverse source
of income less vulnerable than cash-cropping to large-scale market disruptions, as well as
increased food security to families caught up in a natural disasters. Women may cultivate
drought-resistant crops or raise small animals for trade or sale as needed during a crisis. Measures
strengthening women’s homestead gardening, such as contingency seed banks, irrigation systems,
J. Nigg and K. Tierney, 1990, “Explaining differential outcomes in the Small Business Disaster Loan
Application Process;” and see C. Staples and K. Stubbings, 1998, “Business impacts in the 1997 Red River
Valley flood.”
97
W. Lovekamp, 2003, op.cit.
98
M. Paolisso et al., 2002, “The significance of the gender division of labor in assessing disaster impacts: a
case study of Hurricane Mitch and hillside farmers in Honduras.”
96
20
and credit can be taken to reduce vulnerability if local planners and outside responders share
knowledge about this facet of women’s work.99
Specific research questions emerge in different social contexts and hazard zones, but
baseline data are always needed: Who does what, why, under what conditions, and with what
implications for economic recovery. Synthesis of existing data (e.g. census data on employment
and poverty rates, land and business ownership, education and training) is a first step, but genderspecific data may be lacking. Regional historical studies are needed to capture the social
construction of women’s disaster resilience and vulnerability over time. Evaluation studies
should analyze possible gender bias in organizational cultures as this impacts decisions about
staffing, funding, programming, and training in disaster agencies and programs. Best-practice
models of gender-sensitive economic redevelopment must not only be documented but widely
disseminated using diverse media and teaching strategies. Case studies employing qualitative
research methods are needed to fully explore the economic impacts of disasters on such highlyvulnerable women as the unorganized, sole heads of households, and women with disabilities.
At the community level, mapping local capacities and vulnerabilities calls for specific
knowledge of risky social conditions. This research must incorporate gender, race, class, age, and
other intersecting patterns and, to the extent possible, fully engage disaster survivors and
residents in problem identification, research design, data collection and analysis, action
recommendations, and the distribution and use of findings. 100 Guidelines for introducing gender
into capacity and vulnerability mapping are widely available though not so widely utilized. The
grassroots training module Reducing Risk: Participatory Learning Activities for Disaster
Mitigation in Southern Africa is one model, with plentiful examples of how women’s and men’s
local knowledge can be organized to identify risk factors in everyday work and family lives.101
People living in risky environments must be the subjects and not the objects of this
research, in collaboration with the research community in academic, government, and
nongovernmental organizations. Developing and strengthening organizational capacities for
grassroots action research on vulnerability is vital, especially in women’s and community groups
likely to be knowledgeable about community structure and economic resilience. Participatory
action research fosters studies addressing specific contexts and leading to ideas for practical
action. A project currently underway in the Caribbean demonstrates this approach. A set of
guidelines for training women’s community groups to undertake action research assessing
vulnerabilities and capacities was developed on the basis of a year-long action research project in
St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic; during the second year, the model will be tested in El
Salvador and Dominica. After training in disaster reduction concepts and basic research methods,
the community women used interviewing, life histories, focus groups, photo essays, and risk
mapping, to gather data in their neighborhoods. In their new role as informed community
vulnerability educators, they presented their findings to the community at large. The data they
compiled were later developed into local community vulnerability profiles shared with
emergency managers and disaster response agencies. 102
Following hurricane Mitch, the feminist NGO Puntos de Encuentro was very active,
conducting a major household survey, participating in a social audit, launching public education
campaigns, and developing workshops on women and reconstruction. Another action research
model involves a women’s trade union and a disaster agency focusing on mitigation, both based
M. Trujillo, 2000, “Disaster Preparedness: the Gender Dimension.”
Identifying community partners for action research projects is an essential first step. For examples, see
E. Enarson, 2002, “Building Disaster Resilient Communities: Learning From Community Women.”
101
A.von Kirtz and A. Holloway, 1996, Reducing Risk: Participatory Learning Activities for Disaster
Mitigation in Southern Africa.
102
E. Enarson et al., 2002, Working With Women at Risk: Practical Guidelines for Assessing Local
Disaster Risk.
99
100
21
in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The Disaster Mitigation Institute (DMI) and the Self-Employed
Women’s Association (SEWA) often collaborate to study community-level vulnerabilities and
responses to natural disaster and related crises. One study, for example, examined how the Indian
government’s drinking water scheme influenced women’s subsequent migration from droughtaffected regions. Following the 2001 earthquake, they sought data from outlying areas to assess
the intersecting impacts on women’s livelihoods of the severe and long-lasting drought and the
highly destructive earthquake. Because of their strong track record in the most impacted areas,
these organizations were able to reach survivors in remote villages and provide potentially useful
data to guide government recovery planning.
Framing gender, work, and disaster concerns at the global level for stakeholders in
natural disasters is the counterpart to these local assessments. To offer informed technical
assistance to disaster mitigation and response agencies, gender-specific and contextual knowledge
is required. Toward that end, the ILO initiated a high-level expert consultation on research needs
in crisis response and reconstruction. The workshop and resulting research agenda reflect the
ILO’s strong commitment to integrated, gender-sensitive, and labor-intensive approaches to
disasters and related social crises. 103
Help organizations change through advocacy and accountability
Research findings on gender, work, and employment in natural disasters are promising
guides for all levels of government in hazard-prone regions; for employers’ associations and trade
unions or other workers’ associations; for women’s unions, collectives, and other communitybased groups; and for professional associations and the technical, programming, and managerial
staff in governmental and nongovernmental agencies drawn into disaster work. But moving from
knowledge to action is the challenge. Organizational cultures defining disasters as beyond human
control and disaster response as the work of technical experts in male-dominated professions
limits the vision of even the most well-intentioned. New ways of thinking about disasters which
take women’s skills and livelihoods seriously and view extreme environmental events as
windows of opportunity for fundamental social transformation must be promoted, inspired by a
new confidence in women as active and equal partners in disaster prevention.
Women need to be at the table in decision-making roles as communities mitigate hazards
and plan for natural disasters, relief agencies respond to urgent humanitarian needs, and planners
implement long-term reconstruction projects. As scientists, teachers, caregivers, and employees,
women have much to offer in disaster contexts, not least their community connections with
groups considered highly disaster vulnerable, such as the frail elderly and children, the disabled,
widows, migrant workers, sex workers, tribal and indigenous women, homeworkers, subsistence
farmers and small business operators. But women’s social exclusion and marginalization make
this paradigm shift unlikely without sustained commitment to gender mainstreaming on the part
of the myriad of organizations which play a part in disaster prevention, response, and
reconstruction.
How can organizational change be promoted? Gender-smart disaster work begins at the
grassroots, with extensive collaboration between local governments, community groups, and
individual household members to identify and reduce risk. Advocating for women’s right to
decent work in disasters is an essential corollary of the ILO’s historic leadership on gender
equity in employment.
There are many ways forward. One model involves women’s groups and government
agencies directly. More than in other regions, women in Central America are now represented in
disaster reduction and response decisions. The Coordinating Centre for the Prevention of Natural
Disasters in Central America (CEPREDENAC) began its work in l996 with a meeting on Gender
103
This work is summarized in the documentation for the ILO’s High Level Research Consultation, 2000.
22
and Disaster Culture and the subsequent establishment of a Gender Coordination Unit charged
with consulting with women involved in disaster work throughout the region. As in the case of
the ILO’s Gender Promotion program, the Gender Unit focal point provides the impetus for
broader organizational change. Through CEPREDENAC’s Gender and Emergency programme,
Nicaraguan women’s organizations promoted women’s participation in disaster prevention
training courses, still dominated largely by men in Central America and around the world.104
Organizational restructuring is another strategy. The new ILO InFocus Program on Crisis
Response and Reconstruction illustrates this approach, capitalizing on the ILO’s knowledge base,
political capital, organizational leadership and other program resources to make women’s work in
disasters visible. This new focal point proactively approaches social crises such as disasters as
opportunities to promote the fundamental ILO mission and goals. By advocating a labor-intensive
and gender-fair approach, it helps move disaster response from immediate relief to
comprehensive and long-term economic recovery. Consolidating its resources around this theme,
the ILO becomes an effective advocate not only internally but through outreach and technical
assistance to partner organizations. The new approach encourages gender analysis in all disasterrelated research and throughout the planning and implementation of disaster interventions.
Gender experts are available to provide technical support through staff briefings and trainings.
Member states and partner organizations can be lobbied to undertake and report on gender
assessments of disaster interventions and to incorporate gender-sensitive research findings into
the preparedness and mitigation. Media campaigns based on the ILO’s labor-intensive and
gender-fair approach to disasters can bring needed visibility to what women do before, during,
and after disasters. As a key actor in postdisaster economic reconstruction, the ILO can also work
through its regional and/or sectoral frameworks to convene workshops in particularly hazardous
environments, inviting ILO partners to “lessons learned” discussions on mainstreaming gender
equity into disaster work. ILO leadership on using work and employment projects to mitigate
hazards and reduce social vulnerabilities would be a major contribution. New networks between
community-based disaster and women’s groups, government emergency offices, and worker and
employer associations can be fostered, uniting disparate social actors across boundaries of all
kinds in the interests of an integrated approach to disaster reduction at the regional level.
In addition, by integrating new knowledge about gender, work, and disaster into training
materials and publications throughout the organization, the InFocus Programme can help increase
disaster awareness and preparedness throughout the work of the ILO generally and in disaster
work undertaken by its many partners. Cross-training of key staff in government, worker and
employer groups, and women’s community groups has great potential to promote gender
awareness in disaster interventions, on the one hand, and disaster-awareness in gender-equity
projects on the other. Successful training must be inclusive and participatory, and engage women
outside normal channels if they are otherwise under-represented, as is frequently the case at midand upper-levels of governments and technical offices responding to disasters. Training strategies
advocating gender-fair employment interventions should be innovative and multidimensional,
drawing on survivor accounts and field worker experience, case studies from practitioners, and
current research to reach those in adult education programs, community groups, training centers,
and postsecondary institutions.
“Best practice” models, checklists, and practice guidelines alone cannot fundamentally
alter organizational cultures, but are important steps forward. Gender-sensitive guidelines now
available should be reviewed, adapted, implemented and evaluated.105 Reporting requirements
104
See M. Trujillo, 2000, op.cit.
Among others, see B. Byrne, with Sally Baden, 1995, op.cit.; P. Morris, 1998, Weaving Gender in
Disaster and Refugee Assistance; D. Eade and S. Williams (eds.), 1995, The Oxfam Handbook of
Development and Relief; M. Myers, 1994, “’Women and children first’: introducing a gender strategy into
disaster preparedness, ” and research-based guides, e.g. E. Enarson, 1997, “Women and housing issues in
105
23
and performance indicators are also needed to increase accountability when gender-fair
guidelines are introduced. For example, tools for evaluating progress toward general goals (e.g.
“ensure equitable access to resources”) might include the percent of women employed in
construction work, the ratio of male/female trainers and trainees, retention rates for women and
men in nontraditional employment, improvements to increase accessibility in workplaces, job
assignments for women with disabilities, participation rates of homeworkers in loan programs,
documentation of gender-sensitive training materials employed, proportional allocation of funds
to projects benefiting women and men, respectively, and so forth. Other tools such as gendersensitive early warning systems indicating vulnerability to environmental disaster can be
developed in this way. Staff and program evaluation systems must include measures for
documenting the integration of gender perspectives into all crisis and reconstruction initiatives.
No consensus exists in the research community about how to define or measure economic
impacts, but postdisaster “economic reconstruction” projects, like the calculation of “economic
losses” tend to focus on men’s job losses in male-dominated workplaces. Close monitoring of
reconstruction work and other economic interventions for gender bias, on the one hand, and close
attention to economic modeling, on the other, are needed to promote equitable economic recovery
over the long run.
Demonstration projects can also foster organizational change, for example when they
showcase new ways to integrate vulnerability reduction into childcare facilities or health clinics,
or for employer and worker associations to jointly anticipate and mitigate work/family conflicts
in disasters. Pilot programs promoting union-based educational campaigns to increase disaster
resilience in the workplace and homes of highly-vulnerable workers or nontraditional skills
training for both women and men in disaster relief projects would be very valuable. Small
businesses associations should be encouraged to fund demonstrations projects targeting
contingency planning by and for women-owned enterprises; governments could help women’s
groups and unions pilot social insurance programs for homeworkers to reduce their losses in
disasters and other social crises. With its recent disaster experience and strong commitment to
gender equality in work and employment, the ILO has a key role to play by offering technical
assistance and guidance to build bridges between workers, employers, government agencies,
relief agencies, and people living in hazardous environments—long before a crisis develops or a
storm threatens to become a natural disaster.
Looking Back And Ahead
The case studies reviewed in this chapter suggest the pervasive influence of gender
relations and the gender division of labor and social power in disasters. They document women’s
strengths and resourcefulness as social actors preparing for and responding to extreme
environmental events as well as the substantial and deleterious economic impacts disasters have
on their lives and livelihoods.
The paradigm shift from ex post facto disaster relief to hazard mitigation and
vulnerability reduction invites just this kind of attention to the everyday lives and work of people
in local neighborhoods and communities across the globe. In this new paradigm, disasters are
seen as environmental events endangering landscapes, economies, cultures and peoples, but also
offering unparalleled opportunities for alternative development strategies which do not simply put
ever larger numbers of people at greater risk.
At present, the slow process of economic and social reconstruction and the even slower
shift toward community-based mitigation not only fail to capitalize on women’s capacities and
strengths in social crisis but unwittingly reinforce the building blocks of women’s vulnerability to
two US disasters,” and E. Enarson, 2001b, “Promoting social justice in disaster reconstruction: guidelines
for gender-sensitive and community-based planning.”
24
floods and earthquakes in the first place. In the final analysis, the best checklists, policies, pilot
programs or trainings are only as effective as the political will of organizations to act upon them.
There are many promising developments, including the mitigation approach developed by
Duryog Nivaran in conjunction with the Intermediate Technology Group in South Asia and the
gender-aware approach adopted by Oxfam and other progressive disaster responders oriented to
capacity-building and disaster resilience. Women already organized around environmental issue
are an untapped resource, only too aware of how environmental degradation impacts women’s
lives and livelihoods. When women with specialized environmental knowledge and those with
grassroots experience bring an important dimension to the global social dialogue about
sustainable development, environmental management and natural disaster reduction. The UN’s
support of an expert consultation on gender equity, environmental management, and disaster
reduction was an important step, resulting in action recommendations forwarded by the
Commission for the Status of Women to the member states of the United Nations.106 The ILO’s
tripartite structure and strong international credibility position it, too, for leadership in the shift
from disaster relief to disaster reduction.
Recognizing the complex and intertwining lives of women as environmental resource
managers, household and family providers, and informal community leaders invites more
women-friendly approaches to development and contributes to the equally great challenge of
disaster prevention. Without the concerted efforts of both women and men, this is impossible. For
its part, the ILO has enormous potential to increase the knowledge base about gender and
disaster, strengthen the capacity of disaster-response agencies and community groups to address
gender concerns, and advocate for a paradigm shift in disaster planning and intervention. It can
model for all stakeholders and partners a new approach to disaster-resilience based on social
dialogue, women’s empowerment, and decent work for women and men before, during, and after
social crises. By marshalling the resources and political will of governments, advocacy groups,
community planners and private- and public-sector disaster relief agencies, disaster work can
shift from ad hoc relief to long-term mitigation and sustainable development, and from genderbiased to gender-fair disaster work informed by the principles of decent work and social
protection for all. It remains to bridge the gap between needs and resources, and begin the hard
work ahead.
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