Gender Inequality,
Vulnerability, and Disaster:
Issues in Theory and Research
Robert Bolin, Martina Jackson, and Allison Crist
A review of U.S. disaster research suggests a general lack of attention to the
experiences of women. In this chapter we suggest that this ostensible lack of
concem derives from two related factors. First, and the focus of this chapter, the
bulk of research relies on theoretical and methodological approaches that fail to
incorporate recent developments in social theory or research that concern gender
analysis or the status of women (cf. Hewitt 1995; Shiva 1989). Second, because
much of the research is structured and directed by funding agencies and federal
research agendas it involves an applied and managerialist focus that avoids in-depth
analyses of social inequalities (Hewitt 1995). Research on disasters in the Third
World, on the other hand, has far more readily incorporated recent theoretical
advances in the social sciences and, as a result, has been more attuned to the effects
of disasters on women and other disadvantaged groups.
While there are exceptions, it has been traditional in U.S. disaster research to
conceptualize disaster “events†as objectively describable occurrences that result
from various natural forces that impact human “‘systems.†Those systems then
respond to disaster events in a relatively predictable and orderly fashion as they
attempt to restabilize (e.g., Barton 1970; Drabek 1986; Mileti et al. 1975). Missing
from this “classic†model are the effects of historically embedded human practices
that are implicated in creating the “natural disaster†through a complex array of
social activities situated in time and space (e.g., Oliver-Smith 1986). Equally
important, the significance of socially constructed differences and inequalities
among those caught up in disaster has frequently been obscured by discursive
representations of “victims†as objectively constituted by common exposure to an
environmental force and differentiated among themselves only by quantitatively
measured “background characteristics.â€
There is little historically or ethnographically informed attention in the U.S.
literature to those victims of disaster who have been marginalized and exploited on
28 PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER AND DISASTER
the basis of class, culture, ethnicity, or gender, and thus made vulnerable to
calamity to begin with (Blaikie et al. 1994; Hewitt 1995; Morrow and Enarson
1996). Much of the research relies on case studies of specific events, often at the
behest of funding agencies that solicit proposals to study a particular disaster. The
event focus results in research that is rarely concerned with the broader historically
situated political economic forces that predispose an area to certain types of
environmental calamities (Bolin and Stanford 1996), Consequently, how such
forces act to make certain fractions of the exposed population unevenly bear the
resulting costs of disasters are unaddressed (cf. Oliver-Smith 1995, Quarantelli
1989}. The concern with making disaster research an objective and quantitative
“science†useful for informing U.S. policy has resulted in a neglect of the
experiences of those whose lives and livelihoods are caught up in the disaster, and
this neglect, we contend, is most pronounced in the case of women.
The objectivist/functionalist model that has persisted in much U.S. research
(Blaikie et al. 1994) is at considerable odds with current theoretical developments
within a number of disciplines engaging in social, cultural, and historical studies
(cf. Dirks et al. 1994). While there is occasional debate about how to best theorize
what a disaster is (e.g., Quarantelli 1989, 1995), much U.S. literature still relies on
an implicit functionalism of “system response†or organizational management
narratives (Burton et al. 1993; Drabek 1986; Kreps 1989). Such a conceptual stance
is problematic in that it inevitably leads researchers to oversimplify or ignore
significant aspects of disasters, particularly how social forces produce inequalities
of gender, ethnicity, and social class that, in turn, produce vulnerability to hazards
(Blaikie et al. 1994; Hewitt 1995). Vulnerability, people’s capacities to avoid or
cope with and recover from disaster, results from a complex interplay of potitical,
economic, social, and ideological practices present at a given locale and varies by
a given hazard and by specific household characteristics (Blaikie et al. 1994; Cutler
1985). Concern with historically situated vulnerabilities leads to a much broader
analysis than the usual impact-response model.
Disaster research in the United States has failed to engage feminist theory,
gender analysis, or critical political economic theory, any of which could lead to
new questions being asked about social inequality, cultural difference, and social
power (e.g., Best and Kellner 1991; Farganis 1995; Horlick-Jones 1995; Lorber
1994; Pred and Watts !992). Nor does the U.S. literature incorporate any
contemporary thinking on issues of human agency (Giddens 1984). Agency here
refers to people’s abilities to influence lines of conduct in their lives and it calls
attention to factors that both constrain and enable people to act. In the U.S.
tradition, complex understandings of human agency are ignored in favor of an
economistic “bounded rationality†mode! of hazard adjustment which universalizes
a Eurocentric normative ideal (rationality) to the level of a invariant human essence
(e.g., Burton et al. 1993; ef. Callinicos 1988). The multiple intersecting influences
of gender, class, and race on human agency vis ‘ vis environmental risks are lost
in the move to abstract disasters from actual human experience, For example, in a
recent all-male exchange on disaster theory in Mass Emergencies and Disasters,
GENDER INEQUALITY, VULNERABILITY, AND DISASTER 29
only one author (Hewitt 1995:326) discusses the importance of the “missing
voices†of victims. It is our contention that the voice of women is indeed the most
noticeable absence in the US. literature.
The functionalist and positivist theoretical orthodoxy that has prevailed in U.S.
disaster research is, in large part, driven and supported by the public policy-
emergency management orientation of federal funding agencies. Since the field of
U.S. disaster research grew out of military concerns with civil defense in the post-
World War II era (Drabek 1986), it should not be surprising that it has emphasized
order, social control, and predictability, emphases consistent with conservative
functionalist approaches in sociology of the 1950s (Barton 1970; cf. Blaikie et al.
1994), As Hewitt (1995) notes, this early focus has produced a rationalist,
technocratic, top-down managerialist tone in the literature, a tone that, in other
connections, has been characterized as “masculinist†(e.g., Lutz 1995). The concern
with policy and technocratic control has, in our view, contributed to a relative
neglect of the complexities of social inequalities except in the limited context of
how they might create problems in disaster management. Even then, gender
inequality has remained, with a few exceptions, largely uninvestigated (Fothergill,
Chapter 1, this volume). Outside the narrow confines of disaster sociology, there
is, of course, strong evidence of persistent, even growing, gender inequality both
within the United States and globally that is linked to large-scale economic and
political processes in the capitalist world system (Gimenez 1995, Jackson 1994;
Lorber 1994; Reyna 1991; Shiva 1989). But how gendered inequality or other
forms of domination and exclusion affect vulnerability to disaster have been left
largely unexplored in U.S. disaster research.
BACKGROUND
We proceed from the position that, because of generally conservative theoretical
approaches, the U.S. literature has failed to engage issues of socially produced
gender inequality an vulnerability in disasters. Simply put, neither gender nor other
factors of social inequality are adequately theorized or analyzed as complex
historically situated phenomena. In the U.S. research, gender as a marker of
different kinds of social inequality is generally obscured by quantitative analyses
of difference between the two sexes. Discussions that simply compare differences
in disaster responses between men and women routinely avoid any in-depth
analysis of the social-structural inequalities (economic, political, legal, occupa-
tional, familial, ideological, cultural) underlying and variously producing observed
gender differences. As a consequence, important questions about the social
dynamics of gendered experiences in disasters are left unasked (cf. Morrow and
Enarson 1996). Given widespread social transformations specifically affecting
women of all classes and cultures in the U.S., particularly the growth of female-
headed households and the feminization of poverty (Lorber 1994; Weitzman 1985),
it is remarkable that such factors barely register in the disaster literature. While
30 PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER AND DISASTER
U.S. researchers have come to recognize various categories of socioeconomic and
cultural diversity (race, ethnicity, age) as pertinent to understanding social
responses to disaster (e.g., Aguirre 1991; Bolin and Bolton 1986; Perry and Lindell
1991; Phillips 1990), discussions of gender inequalities and how they concatenate
with cultural or class factors are rare (see Fothergill, Chapter 1, this volume, for a
review). Most discussions treat gender as a commonsensical category involving
two internally homogeneous and mutually exclusive categories of individual
attributes: men and women. Gender as a complex social phenomenon underlying
persistent social inequalities is transformed by researchers into an “independent
variable†that is used to account quantitatively for variation in a dependent
variable. With such a transformation,