ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CORAL REEF STUDIES
Scientists say outdated assumptions around gender continue to hinder effective and fair policymaking and action for climate mitigation and adaptation.
Lead author of a new study, Dr Jacqueline Lau from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (Coral CoE at JCU) and WorldFish, said gender–alongside other identities like race, class and age–has a powerful influence on people’s experience of, and resilience to, climate change.
She said the four most common and interlinked assumptions found are: women are innately caring and connected to the environment; women are a homogenous and vulnerable group; gender equality is a women’s issue and; gender equality is a numbers game.
“Although there is a global mandate to work towards gender equality in climate change mitigation and adaptation, efforts are hindered by a set of assumptions about gender, long critiqued in development studies,” Dr Lau said.
The study draws on post-2014 gender and climate change literature, to give an overview of how the gender assumptions manifest across recent work in adaptation, mitigation and broader climate change policy, practice and research.
The review of the literature takes a closer look at how these assumptions narrowly diagnose the causes of gender inequality.
“As a result, we see too many strategies that have unintended–and even counterproductive–consequences,” said Dr Pip Cohen, from WorldFish.
“For instance, strategies that target women only may overburden them, cause a backlash, or obscure the vulnerabilities of other groups.”
The study offers lessons for a more informed pursuit of gender equality in climate change research, policy and practice.
The authors said progressing gender equality means breaking down stereotypes and prejudices about gender–creating environments to enable all people to exercise their agency to cope, change and adapt.
Dr Lau said she was surprised to find so many examples of gender assumptions in climate change practice. She explained that a first step in disrupting these assumptions is to lay them bare and explain why development research has found them to be problematic.
“The social and cultural expectations about what it is to be a woman or a man in any given society will shape people’s wellbeing,” Dr Lau said.
She said alongside efforts to dismantle broader barriers to gender equality, better and more coordinated efforts are needed from practitioners and researchers to disrupt and counteract unhelpful assumptions.
“Pursuing gender equality in climate change policy and practice is critical, and decades of experience in development offer lessons for how to do it well,” Dr Lau said.
“Ultimately, we want to see equitable opportunities for all people to realise their full potential. Where no one is left behind.”
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PAPER
Lau J, Kleiber D, Lawless S, Cohen P. (2021). ‘Gender equality in climate policy and practice hindered by assumptions’. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-00999-7
I really want to see griff’s take on this. 😉
griff’s still trying to figure out which of the 57 genders (so far) will get him the biggest paycheck.
can I still say, “what’s good for the Goose is good for the Gander”?
Or do I need to include the other 55 to keep from being labeled & cancelled?
Put this in The Museum of Unnatural History featuring works like The Orientation of a Sterile Species. And they have the audacity to question Skeptics.
Please good people, your toxic gender-insensitive comments are trampling the “safe space” of countless woketards, who are deeply offended by the slightest of slights. These wokes have led such sheltered lives that a 1-degree variation in their lattes drives them into paroxysms of thumb-sucking catatonia.
I recommend a treatment of international travel in zones of endemic violence, where being held at gunpoint is a routine occurrence. In time, that experience tends to broaden one’s safe space to “anywhere that nobody is pointing a gun at me” – highly recommended, it is a cathartic, liberating experience.
Dr Lau said she was surprised to find so many examples of gender assumptions in climate change practice
Really? Dr Lau clearly has not seen the BBCs gender assumptions. Dr Lau is woefully behind the woke curve.
A BBC programme aimed at nine- to 12-year-olds includes the astonishing claim that there are ‘over 100 gender identities’.
The film, ‘Identity – Understanding Sexual and Gender Identities’, is being offered on the corporation’s website as part of its relationships and sex education package.
BBC programme tells 9-year-olds there are ‘over 100 genders’ – Telegraph
Yes, that what the BBC is teaching children. And it is able to do it far more effectively while schools are closed.
Somebody wake Dr Lau up…
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
-A Maslow
Nothing else to do so conflate gender and climate
Dr. Lau must be the one who is also worried about the gender of a plastic potato.
“The social and cultural expectations about what it is to be a woman or a man in any given society will shape people’s wellbeing”
You give an inch to the LGBTUVWXYZ123 agenda, it takes a mile. We’ve reached peak madness when a man with the family jewels intact can feel pretty and compete in sports against actual women or can enter a womans bathroom, locker room, or shower and almost no one bats an eye and the majority of men just sit there with mouths wide shut while their daughters get to experience the results of society going off the rails and giving control to the real science deniers. We’ve given up so much ground to this absurdity for nearly a generation but then expect that science not get infected? There will be safe place to hide from this madness so you better stand up against it while you still can.
Gender assumptions caused my grandmother’s gout, too. What a bunch of mentally retarded crap.
Be thankful that the study was done in Australia and those of us in the US and elsewhere probably didn’t pay for it. But those poor Australians….
Don’t be so sure about that. The US funds (absurd) research, everywhere, including China, like the biolab in Wuhan. Just depends on giving a kickback to the right Congressman.
We tend to treat these papers with ridicule and sarcasm, because that is exactly what they deserve. Yet, they deserve so much more. We are watching the end of civilization and the decent into a Dark Age, where all of humanity and the physical environment will suffer greatly. If there was a threat-meter, climate change would barely register, while these people would peg the needle! They are the zombie apocalypse and we are apparently going to roll our eyes and shake our heads right up to the time they eat our brains!
decent into a Dark Age,
A decent dark age?
This is the new feudalism, far from decent
Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.
Joel Kotkin on American Neo-Feudalism – Front Porch Republic
Being rural based we are well set to hold off the zombie horde, of either type. Our gas is local, water gravity fed and extensive fire wood available. Hell, with a phone call I can get a truck load of coal in less than an hour. We good.
Who need reason? Money just appears in my account every Friday.
Using pollysyllabic entities in a promiscuous manner provides a definitive methodology for the application of a vocabulary specifically designed to confound a variety of semi-literates.
Now, if you spend some time reading that gobbledygook….. 🙂 Have a passably pleasing diurnal experience.
Right
If they’re speaking about gender and it’s not a discussion about languages the BS is being piled higher and deeper! Virtually any discipline that ends in “Studies” has no business being offered in our schools as it is based on emotions, not research and knowledge!
The mental health of a generation is being destroyed by encouraging base emotions like hatred and envy, while perpetual victimhood is a guarantee of madness and misery! Thus the Progressives perpetuate their religion of nihilism and doom!
Women + coral reef = appreciation of glaciers = cold shoulder? Or something like that?
The excessive time in college I spent studying gender led me to greatly appreciate women, not glaciers. I don’t recall that many cold shoulders, but the dataset may be biased. Perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate then how love and romance is like golf; the winner is the low score!
Put in to google image search “center (or centre) of excellence” and one gets a bunch of self important academics posing”
Not quite as woo-woo as Feminist Glaciology, but approaching it.
The red flags are still out at JCU. Science is nowhere to be found.
This is a strange study, I just rightly assume that anybody who espouses a belief in global warming to be scientifically illiterate and have a nice chat with them about not believing the shit that politicians babble.
I just threw up in my mouth, and am forever dumber after reading that article…
I identify as a non-binary glacial entity does this apply to me?
That’s an ‘icy’ no.
“I identify as a non-binary glacial entity”
Cool !
I bet JCU is never going to fire this woman. All these nurturing Women’s Studies professors should go out to the Great Barrier Reef the next time a typhoon threatens, and lay their bodies across the reef to protect it. Critical race theory professors should go along to show solidarity. Hell, the whole liberal arts faculty and administrators at JCU should go, too. After they pay Dr. Peter Ridd what they owe him, of course.
Where did science go and when did it leave?
All the nutcases are jumping onto the global warming bandwagon.
Well I agree that age has a bearing on your appreciation of global warming. As you get older you realize how much b.s. is out there, how many prople try to manipulate you through lies, and you become in general more incredulous.
Critical Theory advocates, nearly everybody in academics these days, are imbued with identity issues and intersectionality etc so the drivel expressed here is not surprising.
This reminds me of a long and interesting conversation I had with an fellow university student back in the ’80s. I was an economics major. I forgot what field he was in, but both his parents were professional academics, and he was on a track to be one as well.
I was already working in IT and process automation in the private economy. His concern was that IT, robotics and technology in general was eventually going to replace the need for people doing conventional labor and that the vast majority of the populace was going to be unemployed and the proletariat were going to be serfs of elite overlords.
Sound familiar?
I argued that this debate was as old as the spade plow, and that I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it because free markets have always found things to do for people willing to work. (In my personal experience, nobody in any company that I had consulted for had ever lost a job over some process I made more efficient. Instead, their energies were simply re-diverted to other tasks that made the company more profitable)
I then pointed out that the phenomenon he was afraid had been taking place for quite some time. Not only were his parents employed in an organization that was the beneficiary of technological advance, efficiency and subsequent societal surplus and affluence, it was his goal to to join them.
I argue that the problem now is that the expansion of academia ran out of accessible and legitimate endeavors of study decades ago, and now is just making shit up to keep employing the vast numbers of otherwise economically useless “educated” people they’ve been creating at great profit and expense.
Perhaps when artificial intelligence and robots eventually do take over all our jobs, we’ll all just get employed by universities. As long as we subscribe to the correct ideology, anyway. The requirement that studies be the least bit serious has long since been waived.
There are countless positions open in the diversity administration! Each gender is guaranteed it’s own czar and affiliated bureaucracy to validate slights and aggressions; that’s why college costs are rising so much faster than inflation!
It’s almost as if they took C.S.Lewis’ vision of Hell from “The Screwtape Letters” and tried to bring it to fruition!
I thought the administrative ranks of my humble state school were absurdly bloated over 3 decades ago. I can only imagine how absurdly bloated they must be today. Also explains where most of the 6-figures it now takes to get a degree anymore is going.
Brilliant insights! Keep up the good work.