Tuesday, February 23rd 2016 Part I: Mapping Gender and Climate Action

Hi everybody,
This is Gotelind. I am working as an independent researcher and advisor on sustainable energy and climate change policy with a special focus on gender issues, climate justice and multi-level governance.
I am physicist by education, with many years of working experience in research, policy and management, among others as researcher on energy policy with Oeko-Institut, and as managing director of the Climate Alliance of European Cities. 10 years ago I quit my secure job and started my own business.
I have been interested in women and gender issues since several decades, engaging with networks of women in science and technology, and renewable energies. Finally, some five years ago, I started to work professionally on gender in energy and climate change.
I am co-founder and board member of the global network GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice, and served as Focal Point of the Women and Gender observer constituency in the UNFCCC process from 2009 - 2014. Currently, I also have a part-time job with GenderCC, leading a project on gender and urban climate policy which is one of my focal areas of work.
Other recent projects include research, evaluation, advice, publications, capacity building and training. I also served on a number of Horizon 2020 evaluation panels, which gave me some insights on the degree to which gender is taken into consideration in research proposals.

Hi!!
I am Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado, postdoctoral researcher in the Technical University of Madrid. I am architect and urban planner by education.
My research work focuses on the analysis of urban policies and dynamics.
Regarding climate change I am including cc mitigation in my analysis of urban regeneration programmes in Spain and I have recently participated in an international project that has studied the urban climate action of cities from 11 countries of the EU.
I started to integrate gender as an analytical category in my research work in 2013... I think that this online event is a very good opportunity to learn from you and discuss and reflect about our respective approaches and the problems we find to integrate gender in research (mainly from a methodological point of view)...

The German Environment agency has published a trend study last year, identifying resource intensive Trends, among which the emancipation gains of women were addressed. one hypothesis was that increased labour market participation will lead to more mobility and compensation consumption, which is bad for climate Change. another hypothesis was that women led organisations tend to be more economically and ecologically Sound. some studies indicate that women led organisations pay more Attention to green and social issues in the Organisation.
do you have other studies to contradict These hypotheses or similar studies to underline the Analysis?
I'm curious in General what other Topics come up with regards to a gender perspective on resources and raw materials?

Helo,
I am Marta Rivera-Ferre, associate professor at the University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia, in Spain, Director of the Chair on Agroecology and Food Systems and member of the Research Group "Inclusive Socieities, Policies and Communities", where I coodinate the research line "Sustainable communities, social innovations and territory. I am a IPCC lead author of the 5th Assessment Report, working group on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. At the IPCC I co-authored the cross-chapter on gender and climate change (see http://kulima.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Cross-chapter-box-on-gender...).
I work on food security-food sovereignty issues from a food system perspective, including topics such as access to resources, indicators for food sovereignty, adaptation to climate change in rural areas, and agroecology, with an special interest in local traditional knowledge. I am particularly interested on local traditional kwnoledge in the North context as a valuable knowledge we are loosing and that will be needed in future scenarios. My interest in gender started during my PhD, where as part of a young researchers organization by that time, coordinated the gender commission looking at the ceiling glass type of phenomena. Now, my interest is focused on the linkages among agroecology and feminism, including the encounter among food sovereignty and ecofeminist proposals. The fight of peasant women for gender equity was my first motivation to work in this.

I am Lidia Arroyo from the GenPORT team. 

I wish that you enjoy this e-dicussion. Hopefully, this will be the start point of a further collaboration among you.  

Hi Lidia and others from GenPort,
it is a bit difficult to manage the difference discussions in (currently) four threads, which are linked to each other. Wouldn't it be better to have the various inputs in this thread, to make it easier for all?

Hi,

my name is Maria Bostenaru, I am an architect, currently fellow at Accademia di Romania a Roma, in Italy. My research project here is about women and water, namely architecture works with water of pioneer women architects. I hope to draw lessons from this for design projects today.
A feature I noticed, and dealt with earlier on, was the mobility of women during that time, which led to the internationality of the style. With mobility I also deal in the Marie Curie Fellowship Association working group m-WiSET I am member of.

kind regards
Maria

Dear Ulrike, 

You are right. It is better that all of us answer in the same debate started by Jörg. 

Thank you, Ulrike!

Lidia

There's another interesting thread here : http://www.genderportal.eu/group/gendering-climate-change-canada

http://www.genderportal.eu/group/some-more-food-thought-gender-unfccc

Hi everyone. I am a researcher at the Policy Studies Institute at the University of Westminster. PSI conducts a range of environmental policy research using various methods for funders including public authorities from the local to the European as well as charitable foundations. As a university department (sitting with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment) PSI publishes academic research as well as carrying out more think tank-style work.

We recently published a report on climate lobbying by trade associations in Europe which did NOT include a gender dimension. However, I am interested in exploring any possibilities that may introduce gender-based analyses into our existing and ongoing work into networks of power, influence and decision-making. Looking forward to seeing the efforts of the organisers here go rewarded!

Tom

Thanks for this 'how' question, Tom--one we rarely hear from those who think about these issues in a 'gender free' way. Bringing on researchers with a gender perspective in their own work is a positive step (not an exclusively female group by any means) and so is a shared culture of understanding that gender analysis be one of the hallmarks of your policy work. In my view (and I'm admittedly pretty passionate about this), there is no such thing as "good science" if gender is not incorporated, though there are many ways to do this. Collecting gender-disaggregated data as a matter of course is important but the research designs adopted must also be aligned. Beginning by reflecting on why and how it is that gender is not included in this report (and presumably others like it) is the critical first step of self-reflection/evaluation...but how to move others to this point? What do you think were the major obstacles to gender analysis in this climate lobbying report? Cheers- Elaine

Hello all--it's great to see many familiar as well as new-to-me 'faces' here. I got carried away writing the note below awhile back but wanted to both introduce myself and raise 10 pesky and persistent concerns in work at all levels around gender, climate and disaster, which is my entry point. I'll go back and catch up w/ all your posts but already see many shared and cross-cutting issues. Cheers!

Greetings! I’m so pleased to join you today, speaking as a disaster sociologist with substantial experience researching and analyzing the gender dimensions of disasters and the challenges of reducing disaster risk. With an academic background in the sociology of gender (Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1980) and practical experience in the domestic violence movement, I of course saw Hurricane Andrew unfold through this lens when the enormous storm came to Miami—just 2 months after our move there. This was a transformative event which soon led me to research around connections between gender and disaster, looking for instance at how gender norms affect people’s propensity and ability to prepare for the unexpected and mitigate known risks, at how intimate relations (including gender-based violence) change in the aftermath, at gender differences in mental, physical and reproductive health impacts and long-term recovery, at sex as a predictive factor in mortality and morbidity, and of course at how people of all genders make sense of these extraordinary events.

Disasters are becoming part of the ‘new normal’ in a warming planet, now more commonplace though even destructive in their effects due to development patterns, socio-economic and cultural trends, and of course new and familiar hazards, both technological and human induced. The relative neglect of gender—truly a fundamental organizing principle in all societies, as we know from decades of gender analysis across disciplines and issues, and powerful predictive force for in the best of times—and the worst. I have worked with UN agencies, NGOs, and women’s groups in the US, Canada, to analyze domestic violence center preparedness efforts, how the 1997 Red River flood in the Upper Midwest and across the border in rural Canada affected women’s work and family relations, the employment and work implications of disasters for women globally, women and disaster housing in the US, the recovery needs and grassroots leadership of village women following the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India, progressive gender breakthroughs that were possible in the wake of the 2004 South Asian tsunami and other subjects, including how resilience is constructed by women through local quilting networks.

More than answering my own research questions, my main brief has been to understand what the critical questions are that must be asked and answered —and what the essential steps are to achieving this. I’ve been privileged to share ideas and new knowledge through the global Gender and Disaster Network and others in this thriving community of practice. One outcome was the Gender and Disaster Sourcebook project, a web-based compendium of user-friendly international materials in this area. I’ve also worked with scholars around the globe to edit The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Women’s Eyes (1998), Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives (2010), and The Women of Katrina: How Gender, Race, and Class Matter in an American Disaster (2012). In 2012, I synthesized what was then known in the area based on the American experience (Women Confronting Natural Disaster: From Vulnerability to Disaster); and in June, 2016, a new reader will be published on Men, Masculinities and Disaster. My chapter in the book proposes three strands of essential research in this overlooked domain, echoing an earlier research agenda I wrote on gender and disaster largely focused on women.

As an activist scholar, I came to question how and why gender is so conspicuously absent in the work on the ground in humanitarian relief and, more broadly, in the practices and policies of disaster risk management. This in turn led to work with low-income women living at increased risk in the Latin America/Caribbean region to map and analyze the factors affecting disaster risk in the community at large. It also led to a career of teaching graduate students in disaster management, as well as sociology and gender studies. I hope in this way to help redirect the focus and skills of the next generation of practitioner, including by helping them to access and contribute to the empirical body of knowledge around emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes using an intersectional gender lens in their own reading and research. Most recently, I taught qualitative methods to doctoral students in emergency management as my own field work has been qualitative. I also taught on the multidisciplinary nature of disaster studies, just as I did decades earlier when women’s studies first emerged.

I continue to strive for action research and collaborative work between communities at risk and disaster and climate researchers. In my view, this work cannot succeed or be said to be scientific in the absence of gender analysis. In the absence of research with a practical and social justice perspective, we are far from knowing how best to address the root causes of disaster and climate risks put so many at extreme risk and threaten the nature of social life on our fragile planet.

I hope our discussion might engage some of the turning points and persistent stumbling blocks I identify below—welcoming your thoughts and your own questions and concerns.

1. Gender analysis depends on sex-disaggregated data and yet this continues after over 20 years of critique to be slim—or lacking altogether. Just as scarce are good cross-tabulations with other intersecting patterns, e.g. around social class, age, and/ or ethnicity. What are the primary sources of resistance to enabling gender analysis in environmental research, when gender analysis is widely applied (if not ‘old hat’) in so many other disciplines and fields?

2. When the sex variable is included by researchers it too often stands in for ‘gender’ in ways that do not do justice to our lives and institutions. The bivariate male/female variable cannot tap into the reflect the complexity of what ‘gender’ means in everyday personal and social lives. What accounts for the persistent application of the sex variable in quantitative research? If this bias integral to the research design? To the theoretical lenses that guide our work? To personal blinders or oversight?

3. Gender is complex—never a stable, determinative, or stand-alone factor- yet it is also the bedrock of much of social life. Nothing about human experience can be understood without understanding people as gendered as well as sexed beings. Nor can our social institutions we understood or potentially changed without a gender perspective on workplace cultures, institutional practices, and gender-biased organizational policies, including the many local, national, and global institutions and organizations engaged in public and/or private sector climate/disaster research. Why is gender culturally invisible in the workings of economic institutions, for example, when gender so manifestly shapes the household economy and cultural norms about the paid and unpaid work that women and men undertake? What accounts for the lack of intellectual curiosity about the institutional underpinnings of gender, too often misunderstood as ‘only’ personal?

4. People’s lives around the globe do not unfold in a “gender neutral” zone of our imagination—most certainly including men and boys. Gender is as relevant to men as to women and as fluid, contested, and variable, too. Increasing interest in men, most prominently among disaster public health researchers and others analyzing disaster trauma, is a positive trend. Must we await a new generation of male disaster/climate researchers to better understand gender and sexualities as forces in the lives of men and boys in risky environments? Are women necessarily more skilled in or curious about gender-based analysis in environmental research?

5. Sex is fundamentally a biological fact, though shaped of course by culture and politics. It is as important to distinguish from sexual desires/identities as it is from that deeply embedded sense of being manly or feminine or someplace in between. Genders as well as sexualities must be understood and researched in the plural. How can researchers explore the complex interaction of sex, sexuality, and gender in ways that can inform current debates about climate adaptation/disaster risk mitigation – and the much harder debates and decisions to come? What specific steps can be taken in research communities (for example, research networks, journal editorial boards, publishers, research funders, mentoring networks, graduate education) do ensure that gender analysis is understood as integral to good science, not an optional ‘add on,’ because its absence misrepresents the human world?

6. Community-based research is one of many research designs usefully applied in gender research, including around disaster and climate concerns. Rich collaboration between institution-based researchers and “citizen scientists” is already evident in disaster/climate work and must increase. What mechanisms can be put in place to support and reward gender researchers of all stripes who strive to work with local communities and municipalities to analyze how diverse women and men, boys and girls mitigate risk and prepare for disasters of all kinds, as well as differential impact and recovery? How can communities at risk be supported and rewarded for undertaking collaborative and gender-sensitive research on questions of their own design?

7. Gender analysis was born of feminist action and retains for most of us this fundamental character, asking ‘Now what? How can this knowledge be used to reduce avoidable harm? What are the links between climate justice and gender justice? How can steps toward gender equality reduce disaster risk? Are the current parallel networks of climate/disaster researchers and gender researchers a source of strength or a barrier to integrated analysis and action?

8. Gender never stands alone but is as cross-cut intellectually as it is in our everyday lives with all the other powerful “ties that bind” and “lines that divide,” from social class and ethnicity to disability, age, language, residence status and all the other social forces that constrain individual choice. Yet too often in disaster/climate work, gender is explored in the absence of concurrent ethnicity or economic status. This not only sets up false dichotomies (e.g., poverty or patriarchy?) but leads to sterile debates that divide climate and disaster researchers and activists. Why is ‘gender’ so often still misread as ‘women’ and more particularly ‘white women?’ Decades of hard-won experience demonstrate the futility of reading gender as “women” and women-focused research as an optional additive to “real science.” But if gender is complex and qualitative or mixed methods research designs more likely to capture this complexity, opposition is predictable in the many “hard” sciences and professions engaged in climate work and in disaster work. What are the best entry points for intervening in this distancing of gender research and gender researchers in just those dominant research traditions most evidently leading climate/disaster work now and in the foreseeable future?

9. When men’s lives, too, are examined with a gender lens, researchers turn first to questions of vulnerability, for example in studies of PTSD among first-responder professions, still largely male-dominated in most of the world. Yet the institutional and culture power and privilege of elite men is a driving force in key decisions taken at critical levels—for instance, in land use planning, water management, resource development, international financial opportunities, and political decision making. This is an area where gender, climate, and disaster research can and should converge. Yet the study of male privilege lags behind. Barriers to researchers who strive to ‘study up’ are well-known. Is this an opening for critical men’s studies to explore, with gender-focused and skilled male researchers taking the lead—or does that misrepresent the depth of the barriers to research involving powerful individuals, male and female, who express and defend dominant male norms and practices? What can women or men with a male-focused gender analysis bring to theoretical and empirical analysis of environmental action in an era of global warming and of rising risk of hazards and disaster of all kinds?

10. Gender is not strongly recognized as an important part of the climate or disaster research world nor, in much of the world, are women’s and men’s respective skills, capacities, and perspectives fully reflected in activist circles. Even as evidence accumulates that men and women in many context differ fundamentally on their respective knowledge of climate science, their perception of climate and disaster hazards and risks, their support for governmental action to reduce climate risks and for household level adaptations, and their sense of their own expertise—often at odds with the facts, as researchers have found about men who overestimate their own environmental knowledge. How can researchers skilled in gender analysis contribute to the development of more informed and activist publics? Can science-based knowledge help shift the workplace cultures and institutional structures of the world’s key environmental bodies? How can effective media campaigns or messaging strategies developed and used by commercial bodies in market research be adapted to better target women and men, boys and girls with a critical need to know? How can disaster popular culture, for example, be a resource for disseminating disaster/climate research that is as gender-sensitive as popular culture is?

Hi everbody,
I'm Suzanne de Cheveigné. I'm a sociologist and I work on science and society questions in general (for instance right now on the way the media presented the COP21climate conference).
I have worked on careers in research from a gender perspective and I have been an expert for the European Commission (for example chairing the expert group that produced the report "The Gender Challenge in Research Funding").
I am a member of the Horizon2020 Advisory Group for SC5 - Climate action, originally as a representative of the social sciences but of course I bring in gender issues as well.
I'm a member of the scientific committee of Genport.
And I'm very keen on this discussion !

Hello Everybody,

I am Iris Sancho Sanz, my bio is so short that I was hesitating to post it, but why not.
I am doctor on organic chemistry and I did a post doc on Theoretical chemistry. I have been working on a system to activate CO2, and use it as substrate for industrially desirable chemicals. So that's my connexion with Climate Change. Moreover and as a volunteer I am engaged with several gender-activities. I work on women in science seminars and workshops, presenting "famous" female scientific works and/or women networking and promotion. I was curious about this activity because I found it hard for me to come up with a gender-oriented perspective when writing my scientific proposal in such a grounded topic as mine. I am happy to read about your work.

Best Regards,

Iris

Hi everybody,
seems I sent my into into the wrong channel. So here it is once more:

This is Gotelind. I am working as an independent researcher and advisor on sustainable energy and climate change policy with a special focus on gender issues, climate justice and multi-level governance.
I am physicist by education, with many years of working experience in research, policy and management, among others as researcher on energy policy with Oeko-Institut, and as managing director of the Climate Alliance of European Cities. 10 years ago I quit my secure job and started my own business.
I have been interested in women and gender issues since several decades, engaging with networks of women in science and technology, and renewable energies. Finally, some five years ago, I started to work professionally on gender in energy and climate change.
I am co-founder and board member of the global network GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice, and served as Focal Point of the Women and Gender observer constituency in the UNFCCC process from 2009 - 2014. Currently, I also have a part-time job with GenderCC, leading a project on gender and urban climate policy which is one of my focal areas of work.
Other recent projects include research, evaluation, advice, publications, capacity building and training. I also served on a number of Horizon 2020 evaluation panels, which gave me some insights on the degree to which gender is taken into consideration in research proposals.