Climate Change: Analyzing Gender, and Factors Intersecting with Gender

The Challenge

The European Union has the ambitious goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 (European Commission, 2010). The U.S. supports emissions reduction through funding for alternative energy research, but has not legislated limits for total greenhouse gas emissions (Gurgel et al., 2011; Dixon et al., 2010). Both the EU and U.S. also have far-reaching goals for gender equality, but how these two important challenges—climate change and gender equality—might be related is rarely considered (European Commission, 2012; U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2012).

Method: Analyzing Gender, and Analyzing Factors Intersecting with Gender

Research on the relationship between gender and environmental impact is still in its infancy. Analyzing gender, in this instance, means comparing women’s and men’s behaviors and attitudes in relation to climate change. But researchers must ask: Which women? Which men? and compare groups of women and men based on social factors that also predict climate footprint, such as income, educational background, and geographic location. Viewing women as an undifferentiated group and opposing this to men as an undifferentiated group (simply disaggregating data by sex) misses important factors that influence gendered behaviors. Studies that analyze gender and control for other social factors avoid stereotypes and false correlations.

Gendered Innovations:

  1. Understanding the Importance of Analyzing Gender in Relation to Intersecting Factors