By Rosalind Frankly
The nasty and pervasive beast that is air pollution has been clouding the headlines of late, including clean air campaigns and the landmark ruling of air pollution as a cause of death for 9-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah. You don’t need us to tell you that air pollution = bad for health (that black nasal gunk after shuttling around on the Tube is a pretty visual cue 🤢). But what you might not know is that air pollution is a gendered issue. Not only are women hit harder by pollutants due to biology (thanks, hormones and jiggly bits!), but, worldwide, they’re also exposed to more of the stuff in the first place.
Conjure up an image of a kitchen. You probably have an extractor fan of some sort, and cook over a gas or electric stove. Your main cooking-related air pollution will be burning something and activating the smoke alarm. You might not even cook (hello, Deliveroo!). However, billions worldwide have a very different set up: bad fuel (dung, anyone?), inefficient stoves and poor ventilation. And due to traditional gender roles, it’s women who are slaving over them for hours a day, usually indoors, and breathing in a heady mix of toxic pollutants.
PM2.5 (fine particulate matter measuring less than 2.5 µm) and it’s slightly bigger sibling PM10 are the troublemakers here, causing cancer, respiratory problems and cardiovascular diseases. But while the EU recommends safe levels of PM2.5 to be
25 µg/m3, the World Health Organization recommends a much more modest 10 µg/m3.
What levels are billions of women exposed to in the developing world? The TL:DR answer is too much. In Caroline Criado-Perez’s excellent Invisible Women, “The Plough Hypothesis” chapter delves deep into the harms women are facing due to air pollution and how the patriarchy has had such a profoundly shit impact on their lives. Attempts to introduce cleaner and less-harmful stoves actually increased many women’s domestic workloads, pushing them back to their old setups belching toxic fumes. And who can blame them; if you were already doing a punishing 15 hours of domestic shittery you’d also go back to the tool which doesn’t cost you any extra (unpaid) work. Further, one Indian programme produced cleaner stoves which relied on regular mechanical maintenance from “the husband”, who generally didn’t deem the new stove a high priority, again sending women back to more harmful options.
It’s not all bad news, however. As Criado-Perez points out, one Indian initiative realised that putting women’s needs first would actually result in something useable, so a design was created which worked around women’s original domestic setups but reduced air pollution. The mewar angithi – basically a cheap metal structure that can be used on/in traditional stoves and improves efficiency and airflow – has been successful and adopted by many developing countries. Once again, considering the needs of women WORKS.
It’s worth mentioning that even in modern kitchens, the risk isn’t abolished. And with the gender balance still skewed towards women being more responsible for household chores, there comes a nice reward of being exposed to more pollutants. YAY! So crack open a window, take a deep breath and fill your tiny lady lungs with fresh clean air. Then order a takeaway. And hope that one day women everywhere will be exposed to less harm.
Further information to pollute your brains with knowledge
Older women in areas with greater air pollution had greater brain shrinkage than women in less polluted areas.
Air pollution increases miscarriage.