In 2007 an author by the name of Gerd Johnssom-Latham penned a report to the Swedish environment advisory council entitled “A study on gender equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development” [1].
The premise of this study is given in its abstract which I shall read to you:
What we know about the extent to which women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change”
I have read this report through and I can tell you that it is barely about climate change at all and it is mostly about gender politics. The main point that Gerd is making is that men on average cause more environmental damage than women do by consuming more and leading less sustainable lifestyles. Or as I like to summarise “woman good, man bad”.
The author makes many points that testify to this fact but the easiest one to demonstrate what she is talking about refers to the kinds of vehicle I am sitting on right now. Cars, men drive more than women and thus release more of that dastardly C02 into the environment. And this is the main problem with her report, there is no way that someone can deny that this is true. When I was reading the report I lost track of the amount of times I was saying “well of course that’s true” in my mind. So what could be the problem? The problem is her premise leading on to her true argument – which is to advocate for gender feminist based ideals of equality.
The problems with Gerd’s argument are three-fold. I wish to demonstrate the first problem with the following example.
Say if you were to hear a virulent anti-capitalist espousing how women cause more capitalism. If he were to say that women are by far the greatest purchasers of goods and this was used as evidence for whatever ends he had in mind..
A person who would be making this argument would be technically correct but would be suffering from bad premised, like this study also does. That bad premise is to make the underlying assumption that men and women can be assessed as isolated “units” that instead of living lives together can be treated like they are really apart.
Anyone from the real world knows that this is not so. When men and women do everyday things, they don’t do it in isolation. When a woman shops she shops for the family, when a man commutes for 4 hours a day he is doing it for the family. When a man buys a nice car then part of the reason is to make him more attractive, when a woman puts on makeup part of the reason is to make her more attractive. These are generalisations to be sure and men and women don’t always act in tandem, but in this report Gerd simply adds up the column under “men” and adds up the column under “women” and compares the result. This is a tactic that is so unsophisticated that I am amazed that she made no attempt to counter it.
The second problem I find with this report is the baseline assumption that gender equality is a prerequisite to “sustainable development”
She in no way proves that gender equality leads to a world which is in any way more sustainable than it is now. Her argument that because women are better than men for the environment then this is some kind of prerequisite fails to acknowledge that “better” does not mean “good”. Presumably any kind of human is going to consume in some amount and therefore the methods by which we do so are what we should focus on. Hating the rich because they consume that much more (a perfectly fine side effect of a free capitalist society by the way) is not constructive. You cannot completely regulate the lives of people to make this utopian view that many environmentalists have come true. I’m sure that people like Gerd would like to stop me from owning this car, but it isn’t going to happen.
A table on page 39 of her report details a number of differences between what men and women consume, and contains this quote.
Supplementary data to the above table show that men/boys to a much greater extent than women use and own large leisure boats that consume large amounts of petrol. On average they also eat more red meat, drink more alcohol and use more drugs compared to women.
I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we all live in grey boxes, never moving. Wouldn’t that be the most sustainable of all? In gerds world, you wouldn’t be able to do this..
“Sustainability” may well be on the way to becoming one of the most overused buzzwords of the year. It basically means to keep up or keep going. In terms of the environment this refers to things such as using renewable energy sources and recycling. I don’t think that anyone in their right mind would be against these things.
A prerequisite is an action that is required before hand. We can pass all the socialist laws we want to try and change the behaviour of people, if we are still using non-renewable energy sources at the end of it then it is all for naught! Human kind is defined by the technology we create and that is what creates our environmental problems. If technology is the cause then technology is the cure!
But Gerds jaw-dropping proposition is that gender equity is a required before anything else.
So we cannot achieve 100% solar dependency without first achieving gender equality? Rubbish!
The inanity of the idea is breathtaking. It is wrong, simply wrong. End of story.
The third little point I would like to make about this report is that the author fudged its premise. And in its tireless advocacy of equal outcomes fails to address the consequences of these having a negative impact on the environment.
At many points throughout the study Gerd laments on the inequality of women, especially women from third world countries. In chapter 6.B she states:
“In sub-Saharan Africa, only 5 per cent of the population have ac-cess to electricity. This often affects women more than men, as the home is usually their workplace (even when they also have paid employment), and in the absence of electricity they have neither water pumps nor lighting. Lack of electricity and of safe, accessible transport also reduces women’s chances of obtaining education and training, medical care, or a paid job, or of being part of a network etc. Above all, lack of energy means that women’s work is heavy and time-consuming, which reduces their chances of taking part in decision-making on the same terms as men, who often have more leisure time than women.”
As is usual for her, whenever some social blight is described that case is always made, with the regularity of clockwork, of how this particular social blight affects women more then men. She even states on page 14 that women suffer from a greater “time poverty” than men. This kind of endless dissatisfaction with the choices that women make for themselves in a free society is starting to grate somewhat. As endless gender demagoguery tends to do.
But that aside I am confused as to her African example. Does Gerd want to decrease energy usage or increase it? Because what she seems to be advocating here is more consumption. Any moral person when faced with the choice between helping people gain access to energy or to deny that for the sake of the environment would do the former. You don’t need to wrap up your motivations in the first place to jump on the sexy global warming bandwagon in order to make the case for helping people.
In the end, this is my impression of this report. It is not a thoughtful treatise on sustainable development but rather a gender feminist agitation to argue for 1) the superiority of women and 2) the downtrodden status of women. Unfortunately I see it as an attempt to cash in on global warming hysteria to support the author’s gender politics.
What really struck me about the report is its divisiveness. Environmental change is a human problem, both men and women contribute to it. Humans contribute to it. I have stated before that the one true way to cure our effect on the environment is by good science. You could probably quibble about who is “better“for the environment but this is not a constructive way to approach the issue. I and many others are fed up of this continuous “battle of the sexes” and framing this issue in this way is not useful or constructive.
Sources
[1] A study on gender equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development.
Posted on: Monday, March 23, 2009 11:24 PM