How does extreme weather impact women during elections?
Story by Leila Hawkins
Photo by Refat Ul Islam / creative licence
During Pakistan’s general election in February 2024, roughly ten million more men than women turned out to vote. This disparity was not new. Past research had found a gender voting gap caused by patriarchal attitudes: in a survey almost 55% of male respondents said it was acceptable to prevent women in their household from voting if they voted differently from them. A further 8.3% said it was inappropriate for women to vote in a general election at all.
Previous elections saw political parties collude in effectively barring women from voting, going so far as to impose large fines for anyone breaking their agreement. To further complicate matters, since 2018 Pakistan’s Election Commission has mandated that only female polling agents can work at women-only polling stations, creating logistical challenges in recruiting sufficient female staff.
Pakistan also happens to be very vulnerable to the extreme effects of climate change. Local elections in 2022 had to be postponed after heavy monsoon rain caused flooding that killed around a thousand people. Many others became displaced, and a significant number lost their identity cards, which are necessary to be able to vote. As a result voter turnout was unusually low, partly due to uncertainty over when the rescheduled elections were taking place.
If we add disruption caused by extreme weather events such as this one into an electoral process with a significant gender gap, how does this further impact women’s ability to vote?
The climate crisis and voting
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has created a dashboard that tracks elections affected by disasters and extreme weather events, for the purpose of analysing the links between climate change and the electoral process. It was initially conceived to look at the impact of postponing elections during Covid-19, and what measures countries were putting in place to enable people to vote safely, particularly women and people from marginalised communities.
Erik Asplund, Senior Programme Officer at International IDEA, and his team, have gathered data from official sources including national election commissions, meteorological services and media outlets. They use this data to analyse how hurricanes, floods and heatwaves, as well as non-weather events like earthquakes impact voter registration, campaigning, and the actual day of the vote itself.
The aim is for the dashboard — titled the Election Emergency and Crisis Monitor (EECM) — to be a ‘living’ resource, updated with events that impact national and subnational elections and, importantly, what the response is for elections to go ahead. “If these extreme weather events are to some extent, disenfranchising voters, it’s important that the election authority does what it can in order to allow people to vote,” Asplund says.
During last year’s ‘mega-election’ year, International IDEA’s research found 16 countries where extreme weather disrupted electoral events. One of these was in India, which experienced a severe heatwave. According to World Weather Attribution, “human-induced climate change” made several parts of the country 30 times hotter than usual. Campaign efforts had to shift to early mornings and evenings, but the extreme heat caused deaths — in a single day 33 poll workers died in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
According to Defence Minister Ranjath Singh, the high temperatures were partly to blame for the low voter turnout in the first four phases of the election. Logistics aside, some research suggests that, at least in India, heatwaves may be influencing people’s voting intentions, particularly in rural areas where people are more likely to vote for a politician with an agricultural occupation or background.
The impact on women voters
There is a vast body of research showing that women and girls experience the effects of climate change disproportionately, which in turn is widening gender inequality. Women produce up to 80% of the world’s food in rural areas, and when crops fail this affects their livelihoods. Domestic violence also rises significantly when extreme weather causes stressors like economic harm and stopping people from being able to work, and leave their homes.
However there is next to no research exploring how it may be impacting women’s ability to vote. This is partly because data that is disaggregated by gender doesn’t exist. “That’s something we’ve been calling for a long time,” Asplund says. “It would be quite useful information because that gives policy makers, or maybe election administrators, a kind of rationale for expanding or creating measures that would allow both women and marginalised groups to vote.”
Among the other countries that experienced disruptions last year were Tuvalu, where storms and tidal waves delayed voting, Iran, where severe flooding damaged thousands of homes and cut off dozens of villages, and the Maldives, which experienced a record-breaking heatwave.
As well as suffering the brunt of the climate crisis, the other thing these countries have in common is a poor record on women’s political empowerment. If we look at the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for 2024, the Maldives ranks 138 out of 146 countries, while Iran is at 143. Meanwhile the aforementioned Pakistan is at 118. The index hasn’t ranked the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, but in its most recent elections it lost its only female member of parliament, and now has no women in government at all (it also has the lowest proportion of female members of parliament in the world at just 8%).
This may all be circumstantial, but it should be enough to call for more research. This could lead to solutions to prevent voters from becoming disenfranchised. Asplund suggests measures like an ‘express’ voting lane similar to those at airports for pregnant women to vote without queuing during a heatwave, for example.
Adapting voting to the climate crisis
Another important consideration is communicating changes to the voting process. “Say you’re changing the location of a polling station because of a flood. That makes sense, but then how do you communicate this information?” Asplund notes.
“You might have your regular channels, so it might be on the Election Commission’s website, but you need to consider using channels like vernacular radio, and you could also go through civil society organisations that work very closely with certain groups, be it the LGBTQ community, minority groups, and people with disabilities. It’s really about getting the information to the right people in their languages, and also making sure that the actual act of voting is as safe as it can be.”
“What I’ve seen is that some electoral commissions are expanding on special voting arrangements,” Asplund adds. “I think that’s very positive if they have that possibility in their legal framework. That could mean that they extend early voting, maybe either by days or by hours of the day, which could be very relevant in a heatwave situation. Also maybe changing the location in case of a flood. This is an area where a lot of research could be done. What was a bit surprising to us is that no one’s been doing it.”
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