Natural Disaster and Gender

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I found it interesting that this article discusses life expectancy in the introduction and how statistically speaking, women are more likely to live a longer life span than men are. However, it then goes into detail about how women are more likely to die in a natural disaster such as a drought, flood, earthquake etc than men are. This is especially more true in poorer countries where there are more divisions between gender and more gender inequality. An example, the text gives is how dress code makes it hard for women to survive certain natural disasters which can make it harder to react to certain events. Or perhaps, in many third world countries they are not taught how. An experiment was done with a hypothesis of how natural disasters reduce the life expectancy of women more and relative compared to men. There are a greater amount of disasters in larger countries, however, it was shown in the samples collected that the poorer countries experienced a greater amount of casualties. Also the smaller population in a country often meant a larger reduction in life expectancy. It is important to note that the amount of people that were killed in a natural disaster does not always measure the exact strength of how strong it was but the number of deaths are correlated to it. This is because in places where there is a low population, fewer people will die if there is a natural disaster there. It can be even misleading to only analyze the gender gap or ratio from female to male casualties to measure a disaster. It has been suggested however, that the gender gap is decreasing.









Neumayer, E., & Plümper, T. (2007). The gendered nature of natural disasters: The impact of catastrophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy, 1981–2002. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(3), 551-56

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