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http://qz.com/392867/why-women-are-more-at-risk-than-men-in-earthquake-ravaged-nepal/
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Nepal – Why Women Are More at Risk than Men in Earthquake-Ravaged Nepal
The cruelest gender gap.(Reuters/Wolfgang Rattay)
Written By Shelly Walia & Akshat Rathi
1 May 2015 -
Natural disasters are thought to be indiscriminate killers—but is that strictly
true?
It turns out
disasters affect women much more than men. A
2007 study by researchers at the London School of Economics and the
University of Essex found that between 1981 and 2002, natural
disasters in 141 countries killed significantly more women than
men, and that the worse the disaster, the bigger the gender
disparity.
The latest figures from
Nepal show that among the 1.3 million affected by the earthquake, about 53% are
female—a small but not yet statistically significant bias.
That might soon
change. According to the Women Resilience Index, a metric developed to assess a
country’s capacity to reduce risk in disaster and recovery for women, Nepal scores a paltry 45.2 out of 100. Japan
scores 80.6, by comparison, and Pakistan 27.8.
And lessons from
previous disasters show that the bias affecting women can worsen in
post-disaster relief.
Is Biology
Destiny?
There are many
factors that contribute to this bias—both social and biological.
For instance, the
excess female deaths during both the 2001 Gujarat and the 1993 Maharashtra
earthquakes, which killed 20,000 and 10,000 people respectively, were blamed on the fact that more women were indoors
while men were in open areas.
In 2004, when the
third-largest earthquake in recorded history triggered a tsunami in the
Indian Ocean, up to four women died for every man in
hard-hit Aceh, Indonesia. One factor: women in Indonesia do not
usually learn how to swim or climb trees.
During and after
the 1998 floods in Bangladesh, many women suffered from urinary tract
infections, due to the lack of sanitation and the taboo attached to menstruation.
“Common cultural
practices dictate that women’s needs for privacy tend to be higher, so
relieving themselves in public is harder than it is for men. Menstruating women
face additional difficulties when access to water is lost or limited,” a
spokesperson from the international aid agency Oxfam told Quartz.
After the Calamity
The discrimination
doesn’t stop after the immediate search and rescue is over. Sushma Iyengar, a
social educator who works in Gujarat, told Quartz that during the 2001
disaster, “there was a much higher percentage of orthopaedic injury—and a
lot of people got spinally impaired. And among those who became
paraplegic, a huge number were young women, because they happened to be inside
their houses.”
The paraplegic young
women then became more vulnerable to the risks of their
husbands leaving them if they were alive. “Not immediately after the
calamity, but as the reality unfolded, and families come to know that the woman
is not going to bear children, and that she is spinally impaired, and dependent,
and she will not be earning, so she was abandoned,” Iyengar said. “It’s too
early to figure out the extent of injuries, but what happened in Kutch [site of
the Gujarat earthquake] might unfold in Nepal, too.”
Women are
typically more vulnerable than men, especially in patriarchal societies, due
to issues of personal safety and violence and access to
scarce resources. Therefore, when a calamity strikes, the situation
is accentuated.
“In calamities,
you’ll see the best of humankind for the first few days. And then slowly, as
the struggle looms large that you’re going to be without shelter and
livelihood, that’s when a lot of conflicts occur,” Iyengar said. “At such
times, women are vulnerable to different forms of trafficking and
exploitation.”
A report by the UK department
of international development refers to this as “double disaster,” where
indirect or secondary impacts make life worse for women. But some efforts
are being made to address the disparity.
Flipping
the Situation
In Nepal, the
plight of thousands of pregnant women is being given particular attention. The
UN Population Fund, for example, is distributing hygiene
and reproductive health kits.
Such efforts
have in the past been shown to have a two-fold benefit. Not only are the
lives of women improved, but many of them then get involved in relief activities. Local women,
for instance, are the most effective at mobilising their communities.
For instance, an
Indian non-governmental organisation, Swayam Shikshan Prayog (Hindi for
“learning from one’s own experiences”), which had been focused on helping women
in disasters for 15 years, helped spearhead a programme to help rebuild homes
after earthquakes in Maharashtra and Gujarat.
So those working
on relief efforts in Nepal would do well to pay a little more attention to
the needs of women. The rewards would be well worth it.