Women, Water, and Infrastructure

By Jennifer Young

In the field of human development, women and water have grown to become inseparable yet highly contested issues. Scholars and scientists like Dr. Vandana Shiva, a scholar on environmental democracy and specialist on women’s rights and water democracy, claim that water is a universal human right and yet, not everyone has access to it. While men are the ones who control access to water, women are the ones who deal with water in their daily activities. She attributes privatization as the main cause of economic disparities between developing and developed countries. She blames organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for disabling women and other underrepresented groups from having equal access to water, a theory which has come to be know as water democracy (Shiva, 2002). Shiva hit the proverbial nail on the head in her article Empowering Women when she wrote, “We need to strengthen women’s role in agriculture both to remove hunger and empower women. We need to redefine development from women’s perspective to ensure that no one goes hungry or thirsty on this planet” (Shiva, 2004, pg. 3). Shiva has long posited that there exists plenty of information on the relationship between the role of women in water management and development.

Then there are those like the researchers Anne Cole and Tina Wallace of the perspective “there is a need to delve deeper into the gendered nature of water, and into the historical reality that gender has shaped water management over centuries, in order to understand what is required to successfully turn existing gender commitments into good practice and ensure that water systems meet the aspiration of ‘water for all’” (Coles and Wallace, 2005, p. 2). In their compilation of scholarly articles, Gender, Water, and Development, Wallace and Cole state in their introduction that “it remains relatively unclear what approaches help to promote positive change for women in different contexts; history and experience show, however, that achieving improvements in the status of women is a long-term process that will continue beyond the working lives of the present generation” (Coles and Wallace, 2005, p. 5).

Despite these differences in opinion, both camps recognize that to make the necessary progress required to improve women’s social status and reduce water scarcity means recognizing that water is a gendered issue and that women and water are inextricably tied. Development requires taking many different aspects of society into consideration. Gender, Water, and Development does just that by engaging representatives from different disciplines like sociology, history, engineering, geography, and anthropology; Cole and Wallace realize that development cannot be dealt with using only one approach. Their overall findings from the eleven other researchers whose studies they analyze show several themes, many of which align with those of Dr. Shiva. First, in many societies around the world there is social disparity between men and women, by which women have a lower status in society compared to men. Second, water policies have failed to take women into account for decades. Third, water scarcity most severely affects those in rural areas and those who have the least voice in society, in most cases, women. They claim that this is backwards because women are not just passive users of water but most often are the main providers and managers of water within their communities. Fourth, privatization is shown as a major factor in gender-water inequality. The final and most glaring conclusion is that community roles are accepted, making progress in gender development difficult. Women continue to be less powerful then men in most developing societies, disabling them from having access and management of water. As the researchers Caroline Thomas and Melvyn Reader state in their article Development and Inequality, “even supporters of the free-market model have ha to admit its failure to assist the world’s poor, and even its ability to erode development progress” (Reader and Thomas, 2005, p. 83). One of the main issues contributing to the plight of the world’s poor is the lack of women’s role in water management and serious progress could be made in many countries’ development status if more attention were given to this issue.

Works Cited

Coles, A. & Wallace T. (2005). Gender, water, and improvement. New York: Berg.

Reader, M. & Thomas, C. (2005). Development and Inequality. In Richard Little, Michael Smith & Brian White (Eds.), Issues in world politics (p. 78- 95). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Shiva, V. (2002). Empowering Women. Punjab: BBC World Publishing.

Shiva, V. (2004). Water wars: privatization, pollution, and profit. Cambridge, MA: South End.

jyoung16@masonlive.gmu.edu