The structural foundation of our socio-economic system is built on an unequal footing between the genders. Yet, when it comes to an existential crisis like climate change, we are confused regarding women’s increased vulnerability (H.X. Goh, 2012). Climate change is now perceived as an active threat to humanity (United Nations, 2021), and whether willingly or not, is discussed as a major policy issue on most political platforms worldwide. With billions of dollars reserved for climate research, action plans, and crisis handling (Hanbury, 2024; Wehrmann, 2025), we need to critically engage with the direction the discourse and the money are taking.
Women are overrepresented in low-wage, informal, and care-based sectors. In South Asia, over 80 per cent of women in non-agricultural jobs are in informal employment; in sub-Saharan Africa, 74 per cent; and in Latin America and the Caribbean, 54 per cent (UN Women, 2015). Similarly, women account for roughly 60 % of agricultural workers in low-income countries, where climate-driven droughts, floods, and soil degradation directly threaten their livelihoods (UNDP Climate, 2021). Consequently, female home‑based workers in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh report income drops of over 40 % during heatwaves and floods, as their workspaces become unbearably hot or damaged (Nagaraj, 2022). In this context, when we imagine a climate-just future, are we genuinely including everyone, or are we overlooking the deep socio-economic fault lines that continue to marginalize women at the intersections of labor, climate vulnerability, and structural inequality? This paper looks at how adaptation and mitigation efforts that fail to account for gender-disaggregated data and experiences risk reinforcing these inequities rather than resolving them.
The climate vulnerabilities that women in labor face don’t come out of a vacuum and are a result of the deeply embedded socio-economic system that capitalizes on their vulnerability. To critically engage with the climate crisis that manifests in unique ways for women, it is important to look at this underlying socio-economic system. Two broad aspects of this system are key in understanding why and how women and labor became worse off in the climate battle between man and nature: policy side factors and social norms. Social norms and policy factors are interlinked and contribute to each other, resulting in a precarious position of women in labor, further leading to worse climate preparedness.
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Layers of marginalization: Social norms and Policy factors
Cross-culturally, women are systematically excluded from decision-making spaces, whether in household resource allocation, local governance, or climate adaptation planning. Feminist scholars like Sylvia Chant and Naila Kabeer have long argued that women’s labor, particularly in agriculture and care, is rendered invisible precisely to maintain systems where men retain control over material and symbolic resources (Kabeer, 1994; Chant, 2008). When someone is systematically excluded from decision-making, they are not active agents but passive decision bearers. This is especially crucial when it comes to climate-induced challenges like droughts, floods, and extreme heat waves, where being prepared and devising solutions preemptively is critical.
Further restrictive social norms around women’s education lead to labor outcomes that force women into jobs that are unstable and further increase the gender pay gap, pushing women at the frontline of climate-induced vulnerabilities. Decision-making also has a key role to play. The evidence from studies on South Asia suggests that, within the family, the purchase of food and other items of household consumption and decisions related to children’s health appear to fall within women’s arena of decision making while decisions related to the education and marriage of children, and market transactions in major assets tend to be more clearly male (Kabeer, 1999). In many contexts, girls’ schooling is still viewed through the lens of domestic preparedness rather than empowerment, with education often curtailed due to early marriage, mobility restrictions, or the perceived irrelevance of formal learning to a woman’s “primary” role as caregiver. The outcome is a vicious cycle: women are underrepresented in skilled and better-paying sectors, overrepresented in informal or precarious work, and systematically excluded from leadership roles that might otherwise challenge patriarchal institutions. Moreover, policies aimed at increasing women’s labor force participation often overlook these deeply embedded social restrictions, instead focusing on surface-level solutions like skills training or microfinance. Without transforming the gendered ideologies that devalue girls’ education, such interventions risk reinforcing rather than disrupting inequality.
Social norms get translated to larger policy discourses and get solidified as laws and legal regulations if not actively engaged with. In A Field of One’s Own (1994), Bina Agarwal explains the historicity of public policy discussions around women and land rights. The idea of women having independent property rights (including rights in land) was accepted by most South Asian countries in laws governing the inheritance of personal property in the 1950s (and even earlier in traditionally bilateral and matrilineal communities). But such acceptance remained confined to inheritance laws that affect private land; in development policy governing the distribution of public land, the issue of women’s land rights was not discussed till the 1980s. Hence, the redistributive land reform programs of the 1950s and 1960s in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, as well as those of the 1970s in Bangladesh, continued to be modeled on the notion of a unitary male-headed household, with titles being granted only to men. She further notes that this neglect of women’s land-related concerns by both governmental and non-governmental institutions mirrors a parallel gap within academic scholarship, where the relationship between women and property has remained largely unaddressed and undertheorized (Agarwal, 1994). Even today, in India, while 73 per cent of rural women workers are engaged in the agriculture sector, only about 14 per cent of the women are operational holders (Agriculture Census, 2015–16; Khan, 2025).
This stark gender gap in land tenure exacerbates women’s vulnerability to climate change. Without formal land rights, women often lack access to credit, irrigation, government schemes, crop insurance, and extension services, all of which are essential for building climate resilience (Agarwal, 2013; FAO, 2011). Their exclusion from land decision-making also limits their ability to implement adaptive practices such as crop diversification, agroforestry, or soil conservation. Most importantly, as climate-induced risks like droughts and floods intensify, women without secure land are more likely to face displacement, food insecurity, and income loss, while being underrepresented in disaster planning and recovery efforts (UN Women, 2018; Oxfam, 2023). Thus, insecure tenure not only reinforces gender inequality but also leaves women disproportionately exposed to the impacts of environmental stressors.
Secondly, when policy decisions don’t take into account women, we are also erasing knowledge systems that have been devised and perfected by women. This knowledge system has been dealing with climate-induced changes for centuries. For example, across Africa, women seed custodians determine which of the seeds will do best in conditions they predict are about to unfold (African Biodiversity Network and The Gaia Foundation, 2015). Families and communities rely largely on women to make a correct assessment of both the weather patterns and the varieties of crops to cultivate – the refined ecological knowledge which becomes even more appreciated in the context of climatic instability (Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue, 2023). Women’s traditional knowledge and practices have the potential to add enormous value to the development of new technologies and adaptations to address climate change (Lane & McNaught, 2009). Yet accessing this knowledge and expertise is hampered by a lack of attention to gender equality and an often unquestioned acceptance of existing power and gender relations (Alston, 2014).
This underlines how existing policy structures put women in precarious positions. Women who are already marginalized in both paid and unpaid labor, coupled with exploitative social norms, bear the brunt of climatic disruption, reinforcing interlocking systems of gendered exploitation and economic injustice.
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Where do these factors lead women?
Disproportionate Impact on Female Agricultural Workers
Climate change has increased rainfall uncertainty, leading to greater production risks in agriculture. (Afridi et al., 2021) examine the gender-differentiated labor impacts of droughts resulting from lower precipitation using individual-level panel data for agricultural households in India over half a decade. The paper finds that women’s workdays fall by 11% more than men’s when a drought occurs, driven by women’s lack of diversification to the non-farm sector. Women are less likely to work outside their village and migrate, relative to men, in response to droughts and are consequently unable to cope fully with the adverse agricultural productivity shock. The findings can be explained by social costs emanating from gender norms that constrain women’s access to non-farm work opportunities.
Wage loss due to extreme weather conditions
As discussed in section II, social norms and resource constraints can limit women’s non-agricultural employment prospects, their ability to adapt, and increase their vulnerability. Moderate or severe food insecurity among adult women rose from 27.5% in 2019 to 31.9% in 2021 (UNICEF, 2024).
The Unjust Climate report by FAO assembles data from 24 low- and middle-income countries in five world regions to highlight a stark reality: each year in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), female heads of households in rural areas suffer significantly greater financial losses than men. On average, female-headed households lose 8 percent more of their income due to heat stress and 3 percent more due to floods compared to male-headed households (FAO, 2024). This translates to a per capita reduction of $83 due to heat stress and $35 due to floods, totalling $37 billion and $16 billion respectively across all LMICs. If the average temperatures were to increase by just 1°C, these women would face a staggering 34% greater loss in their total incomes compared to men.
Displacement and Increased Informal Employment
Climate change is increasingly forcing communities to relocate due to rising sea levels, floods, and droughts. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), over 32 million people were displaced by weather-related disasters in 2022 alone. Environmental disruptions such as prolonged droughts, floods, and soil degradation reduce agricultural livelihoods and force rural households to migrate, often internally, in search of survival strategies (Rigaud et al., 2018). Upon arrival in urban or peri-urban areas, many displaced individuals, especially women, find work only in the informal economy due to barriers like legal status, lack of education, caregiving responsibilities, or gender-based discrimination, as discussed in Section I (IOM, 2021). According to UN Women, in the ASEAN region, labour migrants include 47% women and 53% men, and climate displacement has already driven many of these women into unstable, informal employment such as domestic work or street vending (UN Women, 2024). The International Labour Organization (ILO) highlights that in general, nearly 60% of employed women globally work in the informal economy, where wages are lower and protections are minimal. Displacement further exacerbates these conditions, reducing women’s access to social protection, healthcare, and stable incomes.
This trajectory reflects and reinforces systemic gender inequalities. Women’s labor is often devalued and rendered invisible (Kemp, 1994; Naila Kabeer, 2003), and their entry into informal workspaces is rarely recognized as a product of structural exclusion or climate injustice. Informal sectors such as domestic work, street vending, and garment production where the proportion of female workers is higher, tend to offer little to no protection from environmental hazards, poor sanitation, and occupational risks. As a result, women not only suffer economically, but remain disproportionately exposed to climate-related health and safety risks. Moreover, without social protection or collective bargaining power, displaced women are less able to recover from subsequent shocks, creating a feedback loop where climate vulnerability drives informalization, which in turn deepens vulnerability to climate impacts.
Increased Unpaid Care Burden
Climate-induced disasters disproportionately affect women, leading to increased unpaid care work as they manage household needs and care for affected family members. With the onslaught of climate change, women’s unpaid work in farming, gathering water, and fuel is growing even more (Redistribute Unpaid Work, 2024). While GBV on its own is a critical issue that rightfully receives attention, the effects of climate change significantly exacerbate ‘time poverty’ by increasing the demand on women’s time for care and domestic work (Ojha & Yalouris, 2025).
According to the report, globally, women and girls aged 15 and older are primarily responsible for water collection in 7 out of 10 such households, compared with 3 in 10 households for their male peers. Girls under 15 (7%) are also more likely than boys under 15 (4%) to fetch water. In most cases, women and girls make longer journeys to collect it, losing time in education, work, and leisure, and putting themselves at risk of physical injury and dangers on the way. This becomes even more complicated when there is resource scarcity (World Health Organization, 2023). Women travel up to 10km daily on foot just to seek out water for their families creating additional risks for women and girls of sexual and physical violence, harassment, incidences or threats of rape (Kambale Kiriko, 2024). Their role is to collect water for the family and the livestock, and the long distance to these water points means an enormous workload for them on top of the family chores and childcare.
An extreme case of the impact of water scarcity has been documented in the village of Denganmal in western Maharashtra, where it is common for Denganmal men to have more than one wife. They started the practice of polygamy just to make sure their households have enough drinking water. Most men in Denganmal are farmers. While they tend to the fields, women run the house, cook, clean, feed, and bathe. In the summer months, the heat is so severe that wells run dry and cattle die. Leaving daily chores and children alone for so long are risks a lone woman with a house to run is unwilling to take. Therefore they started marrying multiple women, the second wife’s only task is to fetch water for the house. Some men in the village have up to four, one legal, and the rest three “paani bais” (Sengar, 2022).
Increased GBV
Gender-based violence (GBV) includes a variety of injurious behaviors that are directed at women and girls simply on the basis of their gender. GBV takes many forms, including but not limited to psychological abuse, physical violence, sexual violence, coercion, survival sex, female genital mutilation, selective malnourishment or undernourishment of female children, and femicide (Agrawal et al., 2023). Increased crop failures, risk of floods, and extreme weather conditions often show up in households in the form of intimate partner violence (Dalberg, 2025). Socio-economic pressures drive sexual exploitation and abuse, early and forced marriage, and intimate partner violence, among other forms of GBV (GBV AoR, 2021). Following acute climate disaster events, food stores, safe shelter, access to services such as GBV services, sexual and reproductive healthcare, education, social protection, and/or access to economic resources are severely limited. Women and girls experience increased risk when attempting to access humanitarian assistance or other basic services, including sexual exploitation and abuse by humanitarian actors, or other forms of violence when travelling to, queuing for, or receiving assistance. After natural disasters, women and girls experience increased GBV risks, particularly intimate partner violence, early and forced marriage, sexual violence, and limited access to GBV response services. Extreme weather conditions like droughts, aridity, and floods have been linked with higher child marriage and adolescent birth rates (UN Women, 2024).
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Way forward: Eco-feminism as a policy tool
The inequalities that have been set in motion due to the patriarchal divisions in society impact not only the kind of jobs women are socialized or expected to pursue but also the actual employment opportunities available to them. And there is an obvious thread linking this to how they get impacted by changes due to climate change, because to begin with, they were not afforded the same jobs or safety or sustainability. Therefore, adopting an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens is essential when examining the relationship between gendered labor and climate change. These issues are deeply interconnected, and attempting to address one without the other risks producing incomplete or superficial analyses. A crucial term here is “eco-feminism”, which has tried to connect the dots between various structural inequalities that women have been facing for centuries with the ecological crises threatening the planet. The term was coined by French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Translation: Feminism or Death). The book explains how two major threats to death, overpopulation and environmental destruction, are fueled by the suppression of women and their bodies as well as the exploitation of the environment by a patriarchal society. In Feminism or Death, she explains that the ecological threat that weighs on all forms of life is not only a priority but indissociable from other fights. Contrary to the emerging ecological movement at the time, she maintains that the destruction of the environment is the consequence of a phallocratic system that originates in masculine and pre-capitalist farming techniques. According to her, these techniques led to the appropriation of women’s reproductive systems and organs, resulting in overpopulation and the destruction of natural resources (d’Eaubonne, 1974/2022).
(Sempértegui, 2019) use the partial connection framework to examine the complex allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminist collectives. Over the last two decades, Latin America has witnessed a massive expansion of resource extraction. She analyses how one of the most significant countermovements to emerge out of this context in Ecuador features a strong base and leadership of indigenous women from the Amazon. In their collective effort to resist extractivism, Amazonian women have drawn from elements of ecofeminist discourse and, in the process, situated their own claims within the broader indigenous territorial struggle.
Ecofeminism is neither a recent academic invention nor an abstract theoretical concept. Its roots lie in lived experiences and grassroots movements, such as the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand, India, where rural women hugged trees to protect forests from commercial logging, and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, where women, led by Wangari Maathai, mobilized to combat deforestation, soil erosion, and water scarcity through community-led tree planting. These movements emerged from the daily struggles of women who understood the intimate connection between environmental health and community survival. Because ecofeminism is grounded in real-world action and lived realities, it holds unique value as a policy framework. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, bringing together environmental justice and gender equity in ways that are both holistic and actionable. Its deep roots in community organizing and indigenous knowledge systems give it a practical edge, making it especially relevant for designing policies that are both socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable.
The exclusion of women from policy discourses on ecological threats reflects what Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) theorists such as Dianne Rocheleau and Barbara Thomas-Slayter describe as the “gendered access to space and knowledge” (Rocheleau et al., 1996), where women may have intimate, embodied knowledge of natural resource systems but are denied legitimacy in formal or technical decision-making spaces. For example, in climate adaptation frameworks, women’s roles are often reduced to vulnerability statistics or resilience actors, without a parallel redistribution of power or recognition of their agency. The global policy discourse may increasingly acknowledge women’s roles, but as (Arora-Jonsson, 2011) critiques, this can lead to instrumentalizing women for project goals without addressing the deep-seated inequalities that exclude them from planning and governance in the first place. A feminist critique thus demands not just inclusion, but a rethinking of how power, knowledge, and gender are organized in relation to land, climate, and governance.
Although the only sustainable solution in the long term is a gender-equal socio-economic system, the journey towards it can be achieved through small steps that center on eco-feminist practices in policy. (Arora-Jonsson, 2011) explain how “in the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate – women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment” as constantly reverberated in reports from international NGOs. Generalizations about women’s vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women’s responsibility without corresponding rewards. Hence, there is an accelerated need to bring women to the center of the policy-making process as active agents and beneficiaries.
Ecofeminism, when used as a policy tool, offers a transformative lens through which labor rights, gender justice, and environmental sustainability can be addressed in tandem. It critiques the exploitative logic that devalues both women’s labor, especially care work, subsistence farming, and informal economies, and natural resources under capitalist, patriarchal systems. By highlighting the often-invisible labor performed by women in agriculture, water collection, caregiving, and environmental stewardship, ecofeminist-informed policy can challenge the marginalization of this work and advocate for its recognition, redistribution, and revaluation. For example, ecofeminist policy frameworks can push for ecological wage systems, support for community-based farming led by women, and investment in green jobs that center care and sustainability. Moreover, ecofeminism urges a redefinition of “productive labor” to include not only economic output but also social reproduction and ecological regeneration. This approach aligns closely with feminist economics and climate justice movements, emphasizing that policies must not only protect natural resources but also empower the women whose labor sustains both communities and ecosystems. In this way, ecofeminism can help reorient labor and economic policies toward more equitable, inclusive, and ecologically sound outcomes.
