Climate Change Increases Women’s Unpaid Work

Women and girls do three times the amount of unpaid care work and housework than men and boys, according to UN Women. But that’s just the first inequity. There’s another, hidden one, that involves climate change and environmental degradation.

“The cascading crises of recent years with their multiple dimensions and uneven recovery worldwide have disproportionately affected women and girls, deepening the structural challenge of gender inequalities,” UN Women reports.

Among those crises are climate change, Covid-19, and a steepening cost of living. Women and girls in the global south are the most affected by climate change when it comes to their care work, which often increases with the cascade of problems caused by global warming, such as water scarcity. This, for instance, leads to more time spent searching for water — the domain of women and girls in much of the world. That leaves less time for childcare, education and paid work.

Water scarcity also greatly affects maternal health. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that the “consumption of larger volumes of water is essential for healthy women during pregnancy, lactation and caregiving, which increases the amount of water that has to be fetched.”

More time collecting water is associated with an “increased risk of sexual abuse, demand for sexual favors at controlled water collection points, physical injuries (e.g., musculoskeletal or from animal attacks), domestic violence for not completing daily water-related domestic tasks, and poorer maternal and child health,” says the IPCC.

Droughts and floods from climate have wreaked havoc on natural resources, which means more work for women and girls when it comes to gathering firewood and buying or farming food. The dwindling of natural resources like fish and arable land means that, in parts of the world, women and girls eat less and last. Malnutrition also has an outsized effect on pregnancy.

In the global south, gender inequality combined with climate change is having dire consequences in the home. In Afghanistan, for example, 61 percent of households reported that, in 2021, women’s workload had increased because of drought, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, which analyzed various countries’ national drought plans.

In the Central African Republic, it is considered “the duty of the mother” to feed their families, which can mean struggling with failing crops because of climate change: UN Women reports that drought makes the preparation of cassava chips, a staple of meals in the country, much harder. The organization explains that “compactness of soil in times of drought makes it difficult to dig up the tubers and there is an absence of water for proper soaking.”

But even with all these very real negative effects, the increase in unpaid labor during the climate crisis “is rarely considered in economic analyses, even though many hours of volunteer or unpaid work are invested,” says UN Women. “Unfortunately, many projects related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, such as reforestation, land rehabilitation, waste management, among others, count on women and their unpaid labor as ‘sustainability saviors.’”

The report continues: “Such approaches assume that women’s time is ‘infinitely elastic’ and an unlimited resource to sustain people and environments, often ignoring or overlooking women’s own health and well-being and the many competing demands on their time.”