Gender and Disaster Vulnerability: Why Women Suffer More in Crises

When disasters strike, they don’t affect everyone equally. Floods, cyclones, earthquakes, and pandemics often hit hardest those who were already pushed to the margins of society. In country after country, evidence shows that women and girls bear a disproportionate share of the suffering, not because of biology, but because of the social structures they live within. Understanding why this happens is the first step toward building disaster responses that protect everyone fairly.

Understanding gendered vulnerabilities in disasters 🔗

Disaster vulnerability is rarely just about geography or bad luck. It is shaped by who controls resources, who has mobility, who has information, and who is allowed to make decisions when crisis hits. Patriarchal norms shape every one of these factors, which is why a 2019 study by UN Women and UNICEF confirmed that women, young children, and youth are among the most vulnerable to hazards, conflict, climate change, and other shocks.

This disproportionate harm is not random. Researchers Neumayer and Plümper, in a widely cited global study, found that where the socioeconomic status of women is high, men and women die in roughly equal numbers during and after natural disasters, whereas when the socioeconomic status of women is low, more women than men die or women die at a younger age. Inequality before the disaster predicts inequality during and after it.

How patriarchal norms create vulnerability 🔗

Several deeply rooted social practices combine to put women at greater risk during emergencies:

Restricted mobility: In many communities, women’s movement outside the home is socially controlled. This delays evacuation, limits access to shelters, and makes it harder to seek medical care during a crisis.

Limited access to information: Early warning systems often reach men first through public spaces, mobile phones, or workplaces. Women confined to domestic spaces may receive critical information late or not at all.

Skill gaps shaped by gender roles: In several documented disasters, fewer women than men knew how to swim or climb to safety because such skills were considered “unfeminine” or unnecessary during their upbringing.

Clothing and cultural restrictions: Sarees, dupattas, and other traditional garments can hinder rapid movement, while norms around modesty may prevent women from running, climbing, or sharing shelter space with male strangers.

Caregiving responsibilities: Women are expected to evacuate children, the elderly, and disabled family members along with themselves, often slowing their own escape.

The cumulative result is what scholars call a stark mortality gap, with women in Bangladesh being three to five times more likely than men to die in the 1991 cyclone, primarily due to limited access to risk information and lack of agency in decision-making.

Case study: The MICRODIS project and floods in Uttar Pradesh 🔗

The MICRODIS Project was a multi-country research initiative studying the health, social, and economic impacts of disasters across Asia and Europe. Its findings from flood-affected regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh offer one of the clearest pictures of how gender shapes the experience of recurrent disasters in the country.

The study focused on Bahraich district, an area where rivers like the Sharada, Ghaghara, and Rapti flood repeatedly each monsoon. Researchers compared flood-affected residents with a control group living nearby but outside the flood zone. The contrast was stark.

Mental health findings 🔗

The MICRODIS team found that the flood-affected group showed large to very large differences from the comparison group on symptoms of anxiety and depression, and scored significantly lower on psychological and physical functioning. These differences were not evenly distributed across the population. Women consistently reported higher levels of stress, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion than men in the same households.

The reasons were structural, not biological. During and after the floods, women’s caregiving load multiplied. They were the ones fetching clean water from distant or contaminated sources, cooking on raised platforms with limited fuel, tending to sick children, and trying to protect family members from snakebites and mosquito-borne disease.

Why caregiving roles amplify risk 🔗

The rapid needs assessment for the Uttar Pradesh floods documented that displaced families took shelter on raised platforms and embankments, sanitation facilities were limited, and communities were practicing open defecation, which further contaminated water sources and exacerbated the risk of waterborne diseases. In such conditions, the household-level work of preventing disease, managing hygiene, and feeding children falls almost entirely on women.

The result is a hidden double disaster. Men lose livelihoods and report acute stress, but women experience prolonged stress because the labour of recovery, stretched over weeks and months, sits on their shoulders. The Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group, working on disaster risk reduction in eastern Uttar Pradesh, also observed that disasters have a greater impact on women, and that gender dimensions emerged naturally as the team studied flood resilience in the region.

Compounding all of this is the practice, common in food-scarce rural households, of women eating last and least. When the family kitchen has only a few kilograms of rice salvaged from the flood, mothers and daughters routinely cut their own portions to feed children and male earners first, deepening nutritional vulnerability over the months of recovery.

Feminist political ecology: A framework for understanding 🔗

To make sense of these patterns, scholars turn to Feminist Political Ecology (FPE), an analytical framework that emerged in the 1990s. FPE argues that environmental problems cannot be separated from gender, class, and power. It places women at the centre of analysis not as passive victims, but as primary managers of natural resources whose work is rendered invisible by both markets and the state.

Women as primary resource managers 🔗

A central insight of FPE is that in much of rural India and the Global South, women are the day-to-day managers of water, fuel, food, and household health. This work is unpaid, unrecognised in GDP, and largely absent from disaster planning documents, yet it is the backbone of household survival.

Water: Women fetch and store drinking water, often walking long distances. When floods contaminate wells or droughts dry them up, women must travel farther and face greater physical risk.

Fuel: Collecting firewood, dung, and other biomass is largely women’s work. Deforestation, floods, and cyclones push women into longer, more dangerous foraging trips.

Food: Women cultivate kitchen gardens, raise small livestock, and process food grains. When a disaster wipes out these resources, the household’s food security and the woman’s economic safety net collapse together.

Health: Women are first responders to family illness, especially for children and the elderly. Disasters multiply illness while reducing access to clinics, leaving women to manage health crises with almost no infrastructure.

The political dimension of “natural” disasters 🔗

FPE also reminds us that disasters are political, not just natural. Decisions about embankment construction, river diversions, urban drainage, and forest management are made in rooms where women are rarely present. Feminist political ecologists argue that mainstream environmental policies are often based on gender-neutral assumptions, overlooking women’s knowledge systems in resource management. When women’s knowledge is excluded from planning, the resulting infrastructure tends to fail the people who depend on it most.

The framework also highlights what scholars call the “social reproduction” burden. Across the globe, due to women’s manufactured role of social reproduction, women are particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation. The household must keep functioning, no matter what, and the work of keeping it functioning is gendered.

Secondary harms after the immediate crisis 🔗

Disasters do not end when the floodwaters recede. The recovery phase brings its own set of gendered harms that often go unmeasured.

Gender-based violence 🔗

Crowded relief camps, broken infrastructure, and the breakdown of community policing create conditions where violence against women rises sharply. A recent UN report found that women and girls living in poverty face heightened vulnerability during climate-driven crises, with overlapping risks for Indigenous, disabled, elderly, and LGBTQ+ women who often have limited access to services, shelters, or protections.

Loss of livelihood and assets 🔗

Land titles in rural India are still overwhelmingly registered in men’s names. When a flood destroys a home or a cyclone wipes out a small business, women have fewer legal claims to compensation, insurance payouts, or rehabilitation packages. This means even well-intentioned relief programmes can reinforce existing inequalities.

Health and reproductive consequences 🔗

Pregnant and lactating women face acute risks during displacement. Antenatal care collapses, safe delivery becomes harder, and menstrual hygiene products are rarely included in standard relief kits. These gaps translate into long-term maternal and child health outcomes that ripple through generations.

Building gender-responsive disaster management 🔗

Recognising women’s disproportionate vulnerability is only the first step. The deeper task is redesigning disaster systems so they no longer treat the male experience as the default.

This means including women in early warning networks, training female first responders, registering land and assets in women’s names, ensuring relief camps have safe and private sanitation, and stocking menstrual and maternal health supplies in emergency kits. It also means listening to women’s knowledge of local rivers, crops, weather patterns, and risks during the planning phase, not merely consulting them after a disaster has happened.

Organisations working on the ground, such as the CARE India project in Bahraich district, which focuses on enhancing disaster resilience for marginalised communities, especially women and girls affected by the floods, show that gender-responsive interventions are both possible and effective when designed with affected women as partners rather than beneficiaries.

India’s National Disaster Management Authority has increasingly acknowledged these dimensions, but translating policy commitments into the lived experience of a woman wading through chest-deep water with a child on her hip is still an unfinished task.

What do you think? If disaster vulnerability is rooted in everyday inequalities, can emergency relief alone ever truly protect women, or does meaningful disaster preparedness require us to first transform the gender norms of ordinary times?

References

1. https://wrd.unwomen.org/practice/topics/gender-dimensions
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00563.x
3. https://wrd.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/Gender-Dimensions-of-Disaster-Risk-and-Resilience-Existing-Evidence.pdf
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/prehospital-and-disaster-medicine/article/abs/impact-of-recurrent-disasters-on-mental-health-a-study-on-seasonal-floods-in-northern-india/7B4CFD70E5924D613A520D86BC514C40
5. https://reliefweb.int/report/india/uttar-pradesh-floods-joint-rapid-needs-assessment-report
6. https://reliefweb.int/report/india/opinion-women-s-involvement-key-part-india-disaster-management-puzzle
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_political_ecology
8. https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/10/1/00038/185042/Unpacking-sustainabilityA-feminist-political
9. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162461
10. https://www.careindia.org/project/building-resilient-communities/