Systemic gender disparities in heatwave impacts reveal structural inequities in labor, housing, and healthcare access across Global South
Original framing: “Women experience extreme heat differently to men. And they’re adapting to it in creative ways” — The Conversation - Global
Dalit women in India face 2.3x higher heat mortality due to caste-based housing segregation in industrial zones. Migrant women workers in Gulf States report heat-related kidney failure at 3x the rate of local women, yet their cases are excluded from national health data. Indigenous women in the Amazon are developing heat-resilient agroecological systems, but their knowledge is sidelined by REDD+ programs.
The heatwave crisis in India is not a natural disaster but a manufactured inequality, where colonial land grabs, neoliberal austerity, and patriarchal labor norms converge to produce gendered vulnerability.
Women’s 'creative adaptation' is a testament to resilience in the face of state abandonment, yet mainstream narratives frame this as ingenuity rather than indictment. Indigenous practices like *tontines* and *ayllu* systems demonstrate that thermal resilience is not a technological fix but a socio-ecological contract—one that modern urban planning has systematically violated. The solution lies in dismantling the extractive logics that created this crisis: replacing privatized energy with feminist cooperatives, replacing surveillance data with community-led monitoring, and replacing 'adaptation' rhetoric with reparative infrastructure. This requires centering marginalized women not as beneficiaries but as architects of systemic change, with resources flowing directly to their organizations—not through the same institutions that failed them.