No, natural disasters don’t kill more women than men.
Every time I see an issue analyzed from a gender approach, and I happen to check if it’s true, it happens to be a lie. In this case the lie is that natural disasters kill more women than men.
You can read it in Vice and more recently the Huffington Post, among others:
According to Vice:
A 2007 study from the London School of Economics found that natural disasters — which are expected to become more severe as the world heats up — are more likely to kill women than men.
According to HuffPo:
A startling 2007 study found that women are much more likely than men to be killed in natural disasters, and that natural disasters also lower the life expectancy of women more than men.
Both point to the same study which, however, does not say that. What it says is:
Natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. In other words, natural disasters (and their subsequent impact) on average kill more women than men or kill women at an earlier age than men.
Please note that the original study offers two explanations for why natural disasters narrow the gender gap in life expectancy:
- Either natural disasters kill more women than men.
- Or the women they kill are, on average, younger than the men they kill.
Both HuffPo and Vice take “natural disasters kill more women than men” as fact, when the study simply offers it as a possible explanation.
What’s more: data from the World Health organization says that that it’s the other way around: natural disasters kill more men than women. And I quote:
Turning to gender differences in fatalities from floods and storms for all countries with ≥ 10 deaths over the period 1995 – 2011 as presented in Figure 5, we find that in most countries, the absolute number of deaths is larger for males than for females. Since men generally exhibit more risky behaviors and engage in more dangerous activities than women, this might explain why men are more vulnerable to flood-and storm-related mortality than women.
Note that for most
countries, loss of life due to floods and storms do not exceed 200 deaths in the period observed. However, in tropical cyclone-prone areas such as Mexico, Japan, the Philippines and the United States, the number of registered deaths from floods and storms is considerable and male
mortality is always greater than that of women (…) in Paraguay, Nicaragua and South Africa, over 70% of flood-and-storm-related fatalities are men.
Since the total number of deaths is subject to the size of the population exposed to the disasters,
in Figure 6 we plot the proportion of flood- and storm-related mortality for men and women.
Figure 6 presents the relationships between the HDI and hydro-meteorological-related deaths by age groups (…) and
gender (…) we find that although mortality rates are higher for men than for women, the speed of change for males is, on average, faster. Thus, we expect that differences by gender will become narrower across countries as human development increases.
So, what the WHO data says is:
- Natural disasters kill a similar number of boys and girls below the age of 15 (although the poorer the country, the worse it gets for boys)
- Above the age of 15, natural disasters kill many more men than women. And the poorer the country, the steeper the difference.
Which means that the average female victim is younger than the average male victim. Which in turn means that female life expectancy is lowered more than male life expectancy.
But again, this happens because adult men die more than adult women. And yet, the whole thing is spun in a way that makes it seem that it’s the other way around.
Let not a single day go by without women being the victims of everything ever.
