Invited perspective: “Natural hazard management, professional development and gender equity: let’s get down to business.”

Abstract

Take stock of the situationWomen constitute a minority in the geoscience professional environment (around 30%, e.g., UNESCO, 2015;Gonzales, 2019;Handley et al., 2020), and as a consequence, they are underrepresented in disaster risk reduction (DRR) planning. Zaidi and Fordham (2021) pointed out that the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR) has failed to effectively promote women and girls' inclusion in disaster policy. In addition, it represents a missed opportunity to tackle gender (even beyond female-male dichotomy) based issues in DRR. Nevertheless, practical actions have been promoted and applied in several contexts with promising results, but often they only remain lessons learned in localised environments (Zaidi and Fordham, 2021). Instead, the global gender gap index, which includes political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health, and survival, reveals that average distance completed to parity is at only 68% in 2019. Although the gap closing rate has constantly improved, it will take about 135.6 years to close it completely (WEF, 2021). These numbers do not yet account for 2020-2021 data, where the global pandemic has more strongly impacted women, their career, their opportunities, and their health in comparison with men (e.g.,