How Gender Equality Is Related To The Environment

How Gender Equality Is Related To The Environment

While everybody talks about men and women equality nowadays, how many of us think about a crucial subject like gender and environment? Certainly, this topic is quite distant from our shaped opinions of gender equality and has rarely been the talk of the town.

As a budding environmentalist and a woman, I feel that the environment is closely associated with gender. Consider this example of 97 countries where female farmers receive only 5% of all the major agricultural extension services.

Though the women in these countries work equally hard or even harder than men for agricultural development, they are sidelined in matters of accessibility to both man-made and natural resources.

A closer look at the subject will acquaint you with age-old traditions restricting women’s access to improved opportunities. Considered mainly responsible for domestic activities, they use water for most of their household chores and at the same time become more vulnerable to water-borne diseases as compared to the other gender.

Now, at the bottom of all this lies a term called ‘Gender Responsive Approach’ which needs to be dug out to not only understand men’s and women’s relationship to the environment but also to give us a way in which both genders can seek equal advantage from the environmental policies and projects.

For News Online
Written By: Sonali Sharma
Dehradun. Uttarakhand