Gender inequality and social exclusion undermine coping ability

A gendered-perspective is not just concerned with women as an oppressed homogenous group, but gives equal consideration to differences between men and women themselves according to their social, cultural or geographical contexts. Building on the Gender and Development Approach (GAD), adopting a gender perspective aims to better address the long term interests and different contexts of women and men, to challenge structures that maintain women’s marginalisation and therefore to address differential power relations between women and men.

Gender inequality and social exclusion are key factors undermining people’s and community’s capacities to cope with and recover from disaster risks and climate events. Socially constructed status, roles and norms are gendered, and intersect with other social identities such as age or ethnicity, to create unequal levels of marginalisation and access to assets between men and women, boys and girls. The combination of power structures, intra-household dynamics, decision-making processes in and out of the home, as well as inequalities in terms of workloads, employment and income, restrict many women across the world from accessing and securing livelihoods and achieving control over their lives. This undermines their ability to anticipate and prepare for major disasters and shapes their susceptibility and exposure to climate extremes.

Building and enhancing people’s resilience thus requires an understanding of social norms, and other societal factors, which maintain gendered power inequalities in different contexts and curtail women and girls’, as well as boys’ and men’s abilities to reduce their vulnerability to environmental shocks and stresses.

While NGOs often claim to empower women, girls and marginalised people, not all the BRACED proposals include clear language on empowerment. Empowerment is a process whereby people suffering from social, economic, cultural or political exclusion are able to decide and instigate a transformation in attitudes and practices. The objective should be to create an enabling environment whereby socially marginalised groups will feel empowered to take control over their lives. Good practices include mainstreaming gender throughout the project cycle management, as outlined in the Oxfam Learning Companion on Gender, Disaster Risk Reduction, and Climate Change Adaptation, to ensure that the different concerns and priorities of women and men shape project design, activities, advocacy, monitoring and evaluation. Other examples of empowerment include supporting grassroots women that decided to organize themselves to collectively secure a range of resources and relationships that help their communities cope with disaster.

Based on the knowledge and implementation gaps identified above, five sub-themes have been identified to guide the BRACED research programme on the gender and social equality:

•  The effectiveness of gender-sensitive methodologies such as VCAs
•  The impacts of education and capacity building activities on gender equality/social inclusion
•  The impact of support to economic activities on gender equality /social inclusion
•  Subjective and normative issues in resilience building. Topics include how perceptions of resilience vary across gender and other socio-economic identities, and the extent to which a gender-sensitive approach towards resilience building contributes to women’s empowerment.