The Gendered Impacts of Heat

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The round up

The heat has arrived and is here to stay. As I write this, Spain and parts of southern Europe are bracing for temperatures up to 44C (112F). A growing number of studies shows just how deleterious extreme heat is to health, especially for certain groups like pregnant women; experts know heat increases the risk of stillterm and preterm birth and has a negative effect on breastfeeding. But until recently, pregnant people were rarely included in heatplans. Germany is the latest country to draw up plans to protect people from heat deaths, which includes pregnant women. “(It is) relatively easy to save them, if you have a plan,” Germany’s Health Minister Karl Lauterbach told reporters in Berlin. Most coverage of heatplans has been fairly uncritical. But with extreme temperatures here to stay, there’s a lot of room to look under the hood of plans to adapt and see whether or not those most vulnerable are actually being centered, or just tangentially mentioned.

Effects of heat also go beyond just heat stroke. In India, where in some places temperatures reached 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit) in June, women suffer more. In part because of division of labor, but also because they drink less for fear of having to use the bathroom more; limited indoor plumbing means exposing themselves to sexual violence in open fields. Last month, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry last month found a 1C increase in average annual temperature was connected to a rise of more than 6.3% in incidents of physical and sexual domestic violence across three south Asian countries. In the Indian city of Ahmedabad, several local collectives like the Self Employed Women’s Association and the Mahila Housing Trust, are trialing “parametric insurance,” where workers can receive payouts on days of extreme heat, so that they don’t have to work under dangerous conditions. Also in Ahmedabad, women are painting their roofs white to avoid the scorching heat. It is part of the city’s larger Heat Action Plan and run by the Mahila Housing Trust (MHT), a non-profit that helps poor women in Indian cities build heat resilience.

News from our blog

This month we talked to digital rights experts on the growing online violence against women, with special attention to the online and sexualized violence experienced by Women Human Rights Defenders. Read it here.

Also if you haven’t already seen it, our podcast production with Casa do Povo in São Paulo is now up on our blog (Portuguese only). Both the Portuguese version and the abbreviated German version can be found here.

Join the conversation - our deep dives this month

• Two great stories with an gender focus were named finalists for the Covering Climate awards. (Covering Climate Now is a network of media organizations focused on increasing coverage of the climate crisis.) The first story, written by Jessica Kutz (@jkutzie) follows a collective of doulas in Louisiana working to help mothers and breastfeeding parents — who are already considered uniquely vulnerable to the climate crisis — get assistance in shelter settings when disasters like hurricanes hit.

• The second story co-published with the Fuller project and The Wire looks at child sex-trafficking in the Indian Sundarbans due to climate hazards like cyclones. But unlike other stories that just expose the issue, this story brings the problem into the much larger debate around climate reparations and loss and damage. Well worth the read. (Also check our our recent blog on sea level rise and reproductive health in the Sundarbans!)

• Finally, we loved this piece on the rise of gender mainstreaming in urban design in The Parliament. A great exploration of the ways in which cities around Europe are are applying new techniques to make urban spaces suitable - and equitable - for all.

Fun Fact

In our “Man the Hunter” narrative, our ancestral males roamed far and wide in pursuit of prey because of their supposed superior strength and innate hunting drive while females stayed near camp, foraging and having babies and probably gossiping. Last month a first-of-its-kind global view of women hunters in PLOS ONE showed that actually, in foraging societies, the vast majority of women hunt and divisions between hunters and gatherers is largely based around individual preference, not gender.