I have been thinking a lot about the fact that the British government apparently thought it was a good idea to host a major international climate change summit using an all-male team.
It really was one of these genuinely puzzling decisions.
As you know Britain is the host of the big UN Climate Change Conference this autumn. It’s the summit where we will hopefully save our children’s future on this planet and all that good stuff.
Last year it emerged that all of the senior people who were going to host the talks for the UK in Glasgow were men. Unsurprisingly this caused a bit of an uproar (there were even outraged celebrities involved). Quickly changes were made and now it seems like 3 out of 12 in the British delegation are women which is obviously not enough… but still.
The whole thing is strange because climate change is a very gendered issue. Women and children are 14 times more likely than men to suffer direct impacts of natural disasters and climate breakdown. The year after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans men experienced an average gain in earnings of 23 per cent. Women experienced an average LOSS of seven per cent. Why? Men got new construction jobs rebuilding the city after the storm.
Women didn’t.
Women also tend to be more concerned about the effects of climate change and they often care about different aspects of it. In general women tend to support lifestyle changes to tackle climate change more.
Many men are intensely relaxed about things like shooting sunlight reflecting mirrors up into the atmosphere to cool the planet. And MUCH less intensely relaxed about a Swedish teenager telling them to eat less meat…
Here in Britain Boris Johnson’s fiancée Carrie Symonds is often seen as the scheming Anne Boleyn behind the scenes responsible for the Prime Minister’s increasingly green profile. What I mean to say is that environmentalism tends to be seen as female. EcoAmerica even identified this as a problem back in 2012. So why then: an all - male team?
Is this a sign that working on climate change is becoming more high-status?
You see, there’s a phenomenon in the economy where status and pay often follows gender. When a field is dominated by women pay and status tends to be low. If a lot of men come into the field pay and status then often go up.
To work in parks and lead camps used to be a predominantly male job in the US. When it changed into a female dominated field median hourly wages declined 57 percentage points. The same thing happened when women went into design in large numbers: wages fell 34 percentage points. When many women became biologists wages fell 18 percentage points….
And so on.
There’s also the opposite dynamic: In my book Mother of Invention I discuss computer programmers. This used to be a female dominated field. Status was low. Then computers became perceived as more important to society and the women were largely pushed out.
In came the “techbro”.
Is this what is happening with climate change/enviromentalism?
I think sustainable investing will be an interesting example. There are SO many more women in sustainable investing than in finance in general. Will this now change?
On the other hand: Maybe the idea to send an all-male top team to host the big UN Climate Change Conference had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with a change in status for environmental issues. Maybe it was just default patriarchal decision making:
- Hey, this looks like an important summit so let’s send lot’s of men because that’s what we normally do.
Yes, I could honestly just be overthinking all of this.
Happy Thursday!
Katrine