Women’s Equality Day marks the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It honors not just the fight for suffrage, but the equality battles women still face today, including climate solutions. While women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change, they are underrepresented in climate and environmental policy-making. Closing that gap isn’t a side issue — it’s the next front in the fight for equality.

Natural Disasters and Women

Globally, climate change is fueling more frequent natural disasters like floods, wildfires, and earthquakes – and the strain has fallen disproportionately on women and girls. They are 14 times more likely to die than men in an extreme weather event due to gaps in mobility, resources, and social status. 

Women also face greater exposure to heatwaves, housing insecurity, and rising utility costs, driven in large part by pervasive economic inequalities, such as lower wages and the burden of unpaid childcare and housework. The result is that 4 out of 5 people displaced by the impacts of climate change are women and girls.

These disparities become starkly visible after disasters like the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In the aftermath, women and girls in relief camps fell victim to a dramatic rise in sexual assaults due to a lack of planning and security to protect the displaced. 

When women are included in the traditionally male-dominated spaces, like helping run humanitarian response teams, they’re able to address risks that disproportionately threaten women and children. United Nations recovery camps have embedded women in leadership roles across camp governance, training programs, and livelihood projects to give women direct influence over recovery decisions and offer new paths to income-generating activities.

Women Leading the Charge

When women are given the opportunity to take on leadership positions, there is a greater likelihood that action will be taken to fight climate change. Likewise in the corporate world, climate governance, environmental reporting, and renewable power investment is greater in businesses with more gender diversity.

In politics, studies have also found that countries with higher proportions of women in parliament are more likely to have stricter climate policies, like higher taxes on carbon-heavy activities and more aggressive renewable energy subsidies. They’re also more likely to ratify international environmental treaties, like the 1993 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, committing nations to protect animal and plant life.

Also consider that women drive 70-80% of consumer purchasing decisions in wealthier countries, and they are more likely to recycle, buy sustainably-labeled products, and save water and energy in the household. Together, this has a measurable impact on consumer behavior and attitudes.

Trailblazing female activists and leaders have paved the way for the modern climate movement. One of the most notable leaders, Jane Goodall, created a lasting legacy of hope and conservation with her groundbreaking research on chimpanzees. Transforming from researcher to advocate, she became a UN Messenger of Peace and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, pushing for community-led conservation and civic participation until her passing in 2025.

Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, is a leading voice demanding fair climate financing for vulnerable island nations. She has already pioneered sustainable financing models and committed Barbados to transitioning to 100% renewable energy by 2030.

Nemonte Nenquimo, an indigenous Waorani leader from Ecuador, sued the Ecuadorian government in 2019, and in a landmark decision, successfully blocked oil drilling in half a million acres of ancestral Amazon rainforest.

A Data Gap

For decades, public and environmental health research has treated men’s behavior and bodies as the default, leaving critical gaps in data surrounding climate change’s effects on women. The people designing green infrastructure, disaster response, and public health policy are left working with an incomplete picture of who they’re serving when without that information.

Women’s health has historically been undervalued, creating significant gaps in the data we have to treat and protect them in response to growing threats. This fact remains true when talking about female reproductive health and plastics exposure. Humans are now ingesting six times more microplastics than in 1990, stemming from the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and their production of single-use plastics. Microplastics enter a mother’s body through everyday ingestion, inhalation, and skin contact and ultimately cross the placental barrier into a developing fetus.

The particles have been found in breastmilk and newborn’s first stool, and evidence shows that the effects of this exposure include higher risk of heart attack, stroke, cancer, and decreased fertility. Some vocal scientists, like Dr. Shanna Swan, are sounding the alarm on the public health threat this has become, but many products marketed heavily towards women, like cosmetics and perfumes, are still using phthalates, chemicals the leech into the skin and create lasting harm.

Beyond the health risks, this data bias also shapes the infrastructure meant to serve entire communities. Much of the data used to create climate solutions is collected primarily on men and treated as representative of the entire population. 

Take public transit, for example. Traditional transit networks use hub-and-spoke patterns, meant to easily transport employees to business districts and back to their residential suburbs. While there is a substantial portion of the population who primarily use the system in this way, women are more likely to engage in “trip-changing.” This means making multiple small stops like getting groceries, dropping on children at school, and picking up dry cleaning. The system’s design forces women’s travel to become slower, more expensive, and, at times, more dangerous, due to many bus and train stops’ distance from women’s intended destinations.

Representation Matters

Designing equitable, effective green infrastructure, and creating a world less reliant on fossil fuels and plastics requires an intentional effort. This means using climate data that shows how issues like energy access and public transport can impact women differently. It also means ensuring that climate disaster response plans and funding meet the distinct needs of women, from protections against gender-based violence to specialized healthcare for pregnant and nursing mothers.

When provided the opportunity, women and girls act as agents of change in their roles as business and political leaders, consumers, and members of our shared environment. There is immense value in looking back and seeing how past actions have created a world that has made women more vulnerable to global warming, but recognizing their critical role in the fight for a more sustainable future creates a better world for us all.

For Women’s Equality Day, we will continue our role mobilizing the environmental movement, and hope you join us in fighting for our future.

Learn more about Chemicals, Fertility, and Our Future by watching our 22 Minutes With Dr. Shanna Swan.

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