More women die in disasters: why? │ The Science of Disasters with Ilan Kelman

What role do local cultural norms play in who dies when disaster strikes? Why might more women die in a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, yet more men in floods in the US? Stay with me, Ilan Kelman, to find out in the latest episode of our new series, the Science of Disasters.

After the 2004 tsunamis pummelled coastlines around the Indian Ocean, killing a quarter of a million people, Oxfam compared the number of male and female deaths. The organisation tallied data from villages in Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka finding that fatalities among women consistently outnumbered those among men.

In some villages, females comprised 80% of those killed. The conclusion is not that women are more vulnerable to tsunami disasters than men, instead, these numbers indicate that society creates roles based on gender which lead to different tsunami vulnerabilities for men and women. In some villages in Aceh, the tsunami struck as women were on the shoreline waiting for their fisher husbands to return with the morning catch. Had the tsunami hit earlier, the men would have been killed as they launched their fishing boats. Had it hit later, the men and women would have been landing the catch, leading to more equal death rates. Meanwhile, in one Sri Lankan area, women were bathing in the sea as the waves rolled in, leading to higher death rates among women than men. These rates would have been different if the tsunami had hit just a few hours earlier or later, when the women were not in the water.

Such differences in disaster deaths often arise based on sex because men and women are often artificially separated in society for cultural reasons. In many tsunami-affected regions, such as Southern India, men are more commonly taught to swim than women. Swimming ability is not always helpful in surviving immersion in a tsunami or a flood, but it does lend a familiarity to being in the water and an understanding of how to attempt to survive.

In some places, women might not be permitted to be outside the home without being accompanied by a male relative, even if a warning had been issued and the evacuation routes were known, without a male relative around, women might have chosen not to evacuate. Neither is the clothing women are expected to wear in many of the tsunami-struck places helpful for moving quickly on land or in the water. Because of social and cultural norms, the women would never consider wearing different or fewer clothes in order to escape with their lives. Dying is preferable to being seen in public without what is considered to be proper attire.

Many other factors likely make women more vulnerable than men to disasters around the world. These factors are not well evidenced for disasters, even though they are well known for other areas of life. Examples are harassment, which women experience in the street, stigmatising menstruation, and the continual violence which women are subjected to. On the other hand, in the US, more men than women tend to die in most types of inland floods. Possibly half of flood-related deaths in the US are people trying to rescue someone else. Most trained rescuers, such as firefighters are men, and most bystanders who take immediate action, driven by societal expectations, are men. A macho culture and the mentality that men should sacrifice themselves for women, as in “women and children first” when ships sink, seem to be increasing the number of men dying, but none of this discussion, from the Indian Ocean to the US, suggests that either men or women are inherently weaker or less intelligent than the other. Neither are they inherently more afraid of water or less capable of making flood-related or tsunami-related decisions than the other. Instead, cultural roles forced on males and females create vulnerability, making it appear as if either men or women, depending on the location and context, must inevitably be worse off in disasters.

And then what happens if you are in a disaster and you have a disability? Do you have the resources to help yourself? We'll be looking at just this in the next episode. Join us then, and don't forget to subscribe to follow the whole series.