Livelihoods, work, women and climate change: women’s voice in just transition

Figures & data

Table 1. The national women’s alliances document codes and names.

Document Code	Document Name
AWHN-01	Australian Women’s Health Network (2014) Impact on Women’s Health of Climatic and Economic Disaster
ES4W–01	Economic Security 4 Women (2012) Economic Lens on Responses in Disaster Affected Areas
ES4W–02	Economic Security 4 Women (2020) Impact on Women in Disaster Affected Areas
ERA-01	Equality Rights Alliance (2018) Submission to the Sustainable Development Goals Inquiry
ERA-02	Equality Rights Alliance (2022) Pre-budget Submission Final 2022
GEND-01	Gender and Disaster (2011) Beating the Flames
GEND-02	Gender and Disaster (2013) Men on Black Saturday
GEND-03	Gender and Disaster (2015) The Way He Tells It
GEND-04	Gender and Disaster (2016) National gender and emergency management guidelines
GEND-05	Gender and Disaster (2016) Women in Fire and Emergency – Vol 1
GEND-06	Gender and Disaster (2016) Women in Fire and Emergency – Vol 2
GEND-07	Gender and Disaster (2018) Long term Disaster Resilience – Vol 1
GEND-08	Gender and Disaster (2018) Long term Disaster Resilience – Vol 2
GEND-09	Gender and Disaster (2018) Long term Disaster Resilience – Vol 3
ATSI-01	National ATSI Women’s Alliance (2020) Domestic Violence
NWRC-01	National Rural Women Coalition (2014) What Do Rural Women Want to Know?
AWAL-01	National Women’s Alliances (2020) Disaster Recovery for Women
WWDA-01	Women with Disabilities Australia (2020) Emergency Planning Issues

Figure 1. National women’s alliances literature KHCoder analysis visualisation.

Note: Multidimensional scaling visualisation of word co-occurrence matrix of the 200 most frequently occurring words based on all parts of speech (POS) (including all nouns, pronouns and verbs).

Table 2. Cluster and co-occurrence analysis of the national women’s alliances literature.

Cluster name	Subtheme/s	Keyword co-occurrences	Explication of cluster and themes
Cluster 1: Women’s experience of disaster	Family and health	‘women’ and ‘family’, ‘community’, ‘man’, ‘health’ and ‘child’	Captures how women’s experiences are centred around the effects on their families, their communities and their health. Women’s participation and support from their community, people around them and social aspects of the disaster is a prominent feature of women’s experience of disaster.
	Disaster and community	‘women’, ‘disaster’, ‘recovery’, ‘social’ and ‘community’	Indicates the heavy load of unpaid work and care women face associated with clean up, subsistence and care for children, elderly and the broader community.
Cluster 2: Policy environment and recommendations	Economic empowerment	‘economy’, ‘domestic’, ‘risk’, and ‘impact’	Captures the research and policy emphasis given by the National Women’s Alliances to systemic issues and questions of women’s economic and social empowerment and how these influence women’s experiences of disaster events, recovery and rebuilding.
Cluster 3: Disaster events and challenges	Impact and recovery	‘bushfire’, ‘resilience’, ‘flood’, ‘drought’ and ‘aftermath’	Captures the major disaster events examined in the National Women’s Alliance’s literature
Cluster 4: Impact on home and domestic life	Home life	‘live’, ‘life’, ‘home’, ‘house’, ‘partner’ and ‘leave’	Captures the reflections and experiences of disaster events and their impact on homes and lives.
	Domestic violence	‘partner’, ‘intimate’, ‘violence’, ‘male’, ‘woman’, ‘child’	Captures the increased likelihood of domestic violence around disaster events, including policy implications.
Cluster 5: Employment and working lives	Job security and employment	‘work’, ‘support’, ‘local’, ‘role’ and ‘business’	Captures the role of work, job security and employment in the lives of people and communities before, during and in the aftermath of disaster events.
Cluster 6: Government and institutional response to disasters	Historical and systemic gender-blindness	‘gender’, ‘emergency’, ‘service’, ‘response’ and ‘government’	Captures analysis of the challenges and recommendations for women during and in the aftermath of natural and economic disasters.
Cluster 7: Emergency and disaster organisation and management	Historical and systemic gender-blindness	‘leadership’, ‘management’, ‘executive’, ‘gender norms’, ‘local expertise’	Captures need to address a history of gender-blind approaches to disaster recovery, planning and management. Recommends increasing the use of local expertise to ensure the safety and protection of communities.
Cluster 8: Experience and livelihoods as evidence base	Experience of natural disasters	‘think’, ‘look’, ‘talk’	Captures consideration of the direct experiences of people affected by natural and economic disasters: a methodological decision taken in evidence collection underlying corpus.

Table 3. Representative quotes derived from following correspondences in the cluster analysis.

Theme	Cluster and subtheme	Representative quotes from original text
Family and community care	Women’s experience of disaster [1]	Visible in the corpus, “Participants in the study reported that loss of a `` home ’’ was more severe on women than men. It was noted by men in the study `` women made the house a home ’’ and invest far more in its daily upkeep and maintenance than men do. While this may be seen to be strengthening gendered stereotyping, observations in this report showed that women were far more attached to home assets than men, mourning the loss of small items of emotional importance … Some women reported they now had the physical structure of the house, but did not want to live in it or invest time in making it a home in case it was taken away by another flood. The emotional investment of rebuilding was at times viewed as debilitating … Evacuation and the impacts of loss from disaster are traumatic incidences for all concerned. For the participants of this study, this trauma compounds with already existing social and economic pressures and has led to severe challenges in rebuilding their lives.” (ES4W–01, 2012)
Employment opportunities and economic security	Employment and working lives [5] Policy environment and recommendations [2] Government and institutional response to disasters [6]	“Disaster response and recovery therefore provides an opportunity to make visible and give greater social value to the unpaid care work that is predominantly done by women. However, support strategies need to recognise the impact that additional voluntary and caring work has on women’s longer-term economic security, and ways to engage and keep women in income earning roles must also be considered. In this way, with a gender responsive and intersectional approach to disasters, response and recovery can conversely be an opportunity to progress gender equality through new opportunities, roles and strategies supports which value the contributions of women.” (AWAL-01, 2020)
Revealing and recognition of gender roles and social norms	Revealing gender roles and social norms Perspectives and reflections on the impact on home and domestic life [4] Experience and livelihoods as evidence base for reports in corpus [8]	The corpus as a whole indicates the value of questioning pre-given gender roles in disaster settings and recovery, for example, “evidence indicates that it is the gendered social norms and narratives, of men as heroic and women as carers which shape their susceptibility to different impacts of disaster in different ways”, “avoid projecting a binary image of men on the ground working, saving, rescuing and restoring while women occupy the role of wives and mothers and take responsibility for emotional recovery” (AWAL-01, 2020), “Disasters have a gendered face. Disasters have been shown to reinforce traditional gender roles within families and communities, with women contributing to unpaid community support work, caring for children and family, while forgoing or relinquishing employment opportunities which are crucial for gender equality and women ‘s longer-term economic security” (ERA-02, 2022).”.
	Decision-making Perspectives and reflections on the impact on home and domestic life [4] Experience and livelihoods as evidence base for reports in corpus [8]	The Australian Women’s Health Network on the impact on women’s health of climatic and economic disaster report speaks to women’s decision-making being curtailed by a traditional and unspoken expectation that the “man makes the decisions”, in life-threatening situations the lack of recognition of the value of women’s tendency to take care rather than defend property may have avoided losing lives: “Look, there are a lot of tough women up here that made brilliant decisions, and are a little bit more logical than a lot of the blokes up here. But in general, the percentage of the women that would have said, ‘Right, no, you’re not staying, get in the car, we’re going, it’s only a bloody house’, would have been 1 or 2%. Most of the blokes would have said, ‘This is my bloody house, I built it, I worked my arse off the last 25 years, I’m not leaving this joint, blah, blah’. And the wife would say, ‘Are you sure we’re going to be alright?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll be alright’. And I know a few families that perished like that. (Lou) (85)” (AWHN-01, 2014).
Natural disaster, resilience and recovery	Disaster events and challenges [3] Emergency and disaster organisation and management [7]	Keyword in context reveals ‘gender’ is frequently used to argue for the need to consider gender in disaster planning and recovery at all levels, within both government and non-government organisations. Non-gendered recovery and preparation plans risk failing to “identify and address the different challenges and needs of women, which would in turn exacerbate the harmful impacts on them”. Women are differentiated in their experience of disasters and so respond with different priorities to men, if this is not recognised existing inequalities can be exacerbated. This theme also captures discussion of disaster recovery as “an opportunity for change, and for promoting gender equality as communities and lives are rebuilt” (AWAL-01, 2020)

Gender and Disaster. 2022. Organisational CV – Gender and Disaster. https://www.genderanddisaster.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GADAus-CV-2022.pdf.

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National Women’s Alliances. 2020. “Joint Position Paper: Disaster Recovery, Planning and Management for Women, Their Families, and Their Communities in All Their Diversity” AWAVA. Accessed April 7. https://awava.org.au/2020/04/07/research-and-reports/joint-position-paper-disaster-recovery-planning-and-management-for-women-their-families-and-their-communities-in-all-their-diversity.

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