As the world gets hotter and hotter, women’s reproductive health and rights will suffer.
As salient as extreme heat and wildfires have been this summer, an important dimension has been mostly absent from discussions of it: gender.
The impacts of climate change are not gender-neutral. Heat affects different populations in different ways. Climate vulnerability depends on intersecting factors like age, income, occupation, disability, race, but also gender, which is often overlooked.
Disproportionate climate impacts on women are partly a matter of physiology. Pregnancy, for example, makes people more susceptible to heat stroke and other heat-related illnesses. Pregnancy increases metabolic heat production and fluid needs, making it harder for the body to regulate temperature and cool both the pregnant person and fetus. Every degree Celsius of heat exposure increases the odds of preterm birth by 4 percent. Heat exposure has also been correlated with lower birth weight, stillbirth and neonatal stress and mortality.
But social and economic inequities women face also heighten their vulnerability to heat, increasing their heat exposure and worsening health outcomes. Women spend more time than men on unpaid household work, affecting their earnings and long-term economic stability. Women are more likely to head single-parent households, experience poverty and live alone later in life. Energy costs are significantly more likely to take up a greater percentage of their household income, making them less able to afford air conditioning or other cooling measures.
Access to cooling is a new frontier of climate justice. To improve it, UN Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) recommends subsidizing electricity or cooling devices for low income families, making cooling centers accessible and welcoming to women and collecting and analyzing currently disaggregated data on gender and heat impacts.
But from the data we already have, it’s predictable as the world gets hotter and hotter, women’s reproductive health and rights will suffer, as gender inequality makes climate-related shocks harder to withstand, especially in places where governments ignore or even exacerbate their vulnerability.
Protecting women…must be central to climate action, not peripheral.
In the U.S., Trump’s administration hasn’t just passively failed to address the climate-gender connection, it actively dismantled the EPA Office of Research and Development that studied wildfires, drinking water, climate change and other health threats while at the same time gutting the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reproductive health divisions and programs.
In U.S. local and state jurisdictions, heat action plans may broadly identify populations more at risk, but rarely incorporate gender-specific data, so they often don’t acknowledge or plan for the increased risks women face during extreme heat events, ranging from more domestic violence to higher mortality and morbidity.
For example, New York State’s Extreme Heat Action Plan has a woman drinking water on the cover, but mention’s women only once, to note that pregnancy is a risk factor, while Los Angeles County’s Heat Action Plan never mentions women’s health, reproductive health or pregnancy at all.
But other places offer models for incorporating gendered impacts into climate planning. In Ahmedabad in western India, for example, the city’s Heat Action Plan partners with the grassroots women’s organization Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) to offer heat insurance. It compensates workers for income lost during extreme heat events, reducing the need to work in dangerous conditions and saving lives. MHT’s Cool Roof Initiative installs heat-reflective roof coatings in low-income homes. That lowers indoor temperatures by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius and protects the women doing unpaid care work inside.
Extreme heat is already a major public health problem and it will get worse as the world warms. Protecting women, especially those with multiple factors of vulnerability, must be central to climate action, not peripheral.
To save lives and uphold rights, government policies and heat action plans need to address the physiological, social and economic factors that put women at higher risk.
