The Gender Turn in Health and Climate

Hello everyone

Happy New Year from all of us at Yarrow Global! Before we jump into projects and events we have planned for this year, we wanted to take this moment to reflect on 2023. Last year was eventful in all the big ways. We saw some major implementation of feminist policies in countries around the world and a deepening of feminist ideas in health and the environment. We also saw alarming developments in terms of an uptick in populist, right-leaning governments seeking to curtail progress on gender equality and restrict access to healthcare and services for women and the LGBTQ community. Last year was overshadowed by several wars, including those that make it into the headlines like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and those that don’t, like the brutal conflict that has been ongoing for over half a year in Sudan. We’ve explored many of these topics in our newsletters, looking at the importance of gender for peace-building processes and what a feminist response to the conflict in Palestine looks like. Last year, we also ramped up our coverage of gender-specific impacts of climate and environmental issues, from saltwater intrusion in India from rising sea levels to the gendered impact of extreme heat. Our last blog of the year is a Q&A with Aimee-Noel Mbiyozo on gender, mobility and the climate crisis. Both war and the climate crisis will cause growing displacements, domestically and internationally. Mbiyozo researches how intersecting identities – gender and immigration in particular –combine to create unique challenges for dealing with climate change. This year, we are excited to dig more into these and similar topics. Thanks for reading!

The Roundup

Instead of our newsletter, we wanted to give you a sense of what we are looking forward to in 2024. Here are three trends we’re excited to see (hopefully) blossom this year:

• Gender will become central - not tangential - in policy relating to climate change and the environment. Look back 10 years at most policies that deal with climate change, health, and the environment and you would be lucky to even find mention of gender. If you did, it may have been a cursory nod to the fact that women are disproportionately affected by climate change. But 2023 signaled a year of “firsts'' on this front. For the first time, a national climate assessment in the US included a section dedicated to women’s health and acknowledged that LGBTQ+ people are more vulnerable to the climate crisis, for example.  We predict that 2024 will be the year that having a climate action plan that doesn’t include gender will become pasé. Hopefully this will also extend beyond just cis women; the growing research and awareness of gender diversity will also see a greater inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in climate action and adaptation plans.

• Healthcare systems continue to shift their focus from just looking at disease and sickness towards focusing on health equity. Health equity is the idea that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible, dependent as much on political and community decisions as on individual choices. More and more conversations are highlighting improvements in population health and well being (such as mental health, disability and age-related) and innovative methods to honestly address obstacles. There is growing recognition that we collectively need to work towards addressing those social determinants of health (SDH) that contribute to poor health outcomes, such as poverty, discrimination of all kinds and profit-oriented medicalization of health . Addressing these SDH will have as great an impact on eliminating disease in individuals as the expensive and often poor quality healthcare services we currently support.  We are optimistic about this shift to innovative means to keep our communities healthy and well, cautiously so, and filled with hope for the upcoming year.  

• Gender-specific medicine will finally become mainstream. A growing body of evidence and research around the sexism that exists in medicine, and the ways that this has caused massive harm for women, BIPOC communities, and sexual minorities. Rather than prescribing medicine and treatments based on the standard white, male body there is growing recognition of the need to include the biological and social construction of the person being treated, what is being termed “Gender-specific medicine.” The university in Zurich created the first University chair for Gender-specific medicine in Switzerland, and we expect more of this to come in 2024.

Join the conversation - our recommended deep dives this month

• Listen: our CEO Lila was featured on “Alltagsfeminismus” where she spoke about the importance of saying no. Give it a listen here (in German only)

• Read: Lesson in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (2022) highlights the  plight of women in the 50s and 60s...but much of it is still so true today, sexual assault, sexism, homophobia, lack of choice about pregnancies and career and so forth.  In 2022 (the year of the book's publication), Carolyn Bertozzi became (only) the 8th woman ever to earn a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and for 2022 the only woman awarded in the sciences. She is also the first openly LGBTQ+ person to earn a Nobel Prize in the sciences.

• Listen: “In Bed with the Right” is a fascinating podcast exploring right wing ideas about gender, sex and sexuality – and plumbing the ways in which these ideas persist in and shape our present moment. Listen to the episodes here: 

• Book rec: The Island of Sea Women. A beautiful and heartbreaking story that follows the lives of Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very different backgrounds in Korea, as they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective.