Gender inequality, reproductive justice, and decoupling economic growth and emissions: a panel analysis of the moderating association of gender equality on the relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions

ABSTRACT

Understanding how carbon dioxide emissions (CO₂) can be decoupled from economic growth is an important part of planning for climate change mitigation. A variety of critical environmental theories contend that the oppression of marginalized groups is interconnected with the mistreatment and destruction of nature. As a result, social equity, or the removal of barriers of structural inequality, often coincide with environmental quality and reduced environmental degradation. To date, there is limited research on the dialectical relationship between inequality, economic growth, and the environment. The present study seeks to further understand the relationship between social inequality and the environment by assessing how gender equality decouples economic growth from CO₂ emissions. We construct a fixed-effects panel regression model with robust standard errors that accounts for clustering in 140 nations to assess how gender inequality interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO₂ emissions per capita. Our findings indicate that in nations with more gender equality, the association between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions is much lower than in nations with higher levels of gender inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental sociology
• ecofeminism
• decoupling
• climate change

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We exclude former Soviet Republics because previous research has found that economic development in these nations have unique associations to CO₂ emissions (see York 2008). Robustness checks revealed that while our overall findings are consistent when we include former soviet republics, on their own, they have a significantly different correlation than all other nations.

2. Robustness checks reveal that our findings are substantively unchanged when we exclude nations with missing data points in order to have balanced panels.

3. As a robustness check models were also run wherein nations were grouped according to income classification as opposed to the World Bank’s development classification. The results of these analysis did not differ meaningfully from those presented here. The results of these robustness checks are available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julius Alexander McGee

Julius Alexander McGee is an assistant professor of sociology at Portland State University. His research explores socioeconomic factors that mitigate and contribute to climate change.

Patrick Trent Greiner

Patrick Trent Greiner is an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. His research engages with the relationships among social structures, inequality, and environmental outcomes. He is also interested in the interface of resource management, biodiversity loss, environmental justice, and public policy.

Mackenzie Christensen

MacKenzie A. Christensen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include gender, social demography, and technology and digitalization. Her most recent project examines cross-national gender differences in technological self-efficacy, with particular attention to how national indicators of gender inequality and societal affluence shape cultural gender beliefs.

Christina Ergas

Christina Ergas is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee. She completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society in 2017 and received a PhD from the University of Oregon in 2013. Dr. Ergas generally researches the relationship between social inequities and the natural environment. A few journals she has published research include Social Science Research, Rural Sociology, Journal of World-Systems Research, Critical Sociology, and Organization and Environment.

Matthew Thomas Clement

Matthew Thomas Clement is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas State University, where he teaches classes on statistics and environmental sociology. His research focuses on two questions pertaining to socio-environmental interactions: How does modern development transform and respond to changes in the built and natural environments, and what role does urbanization play in this process? Previous work on these topics has been published in Population and Environment, Social Forces, and Social Science Research.