How Women Can Aid The Environmental Change

The bridge between gender orientation and environmental change is step by step winding up more generally known as environmental change is progressively comprehended as far as human rights and social equity, however for those still oblivious, here are the two key things you need to know:

1. Women are distinctively influenced by environmental change because of their social and financial disparity (similarly as all minimized gatherings are influenced diversely as per their imbalance – including indigenous individuals, ethnic minorities, and the worldwide poor)

2. Women can offer unbelievably capable answers for environmental change – yet they're reliably avoided from arrangement making positions, from nearby government to global legislative issues, regardless of their novel potential to help battle environmental change.

Their prohibition from customary places of energy and basic leadership is maybe why women are so common in grassroots developments and ground-level answers for environmental change – especially in the worldwide south.

Here are three current energy projects that are driven by or concentrated on women, that outline the social, political and monetary advantages of decentralized clean energy generation era for the world's most defenseless individuals – and for the atmosphere.

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These examples are all about solar power, but there are literally countless other ways that women are proving instrumental in both adapting to and mitigating climate change all over the world.

1. Solar Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves
Gender inequality (and women’s greater vulnerability to the effects of climate change) is often directly linked to poverty, but studies show that the greater the proportion of a country’s population that has access to electricity, the greater its gender equality, regardless of the amount living below the poverty line ($1.25 a day).

Fossil fuel companies will use this kind of information to insist that cheap coal is vital to the development of countries in the global south, but women-led social enterprise Solar Sister has an alternative plan – one that economically empowers women and doesn't involve burning the most polluting fossil fuel around.

Solar Sister aims to eradicate energy poverty by creating a deliberately woman-centered direct sales network that brings clean energy tech to some of the poorest and most remote communities in rural Africa.

Women buy solar lamps and clean cook stoves from other women to use and sell in their own communities, supplementing their income whilst giving them light to read and work by that doesn't involve inhaling toxic fumes.

2. Rooftop Indian Grannies
This project is similar to Solar Sister, but it goes one step further along the inter-sectional scale, focusing on perhaps the most vulnerable type of woman – an old one.

In societies across the world, from remote rural villages in India to developed countries in the global north, women lose their social value as they age – no longer (conventionally) attractive or reproductive, they outgrow their use and are accordingly gradually sidelined.

The Barefoot College in Rajasthan trains older Indian women to become solar engineers, allowing them to challenge perceptions of their obsolescence, raising their social standing and influence in their communities.

Solar grannies, as they are known, demand respect for their specialist knowledge, and for bringing transformative access to light to their villages.

Training older women is also a strategic choice.
Young men invariably leave their villages for work, and would take their knowledge with them, leaving the community without someone to maintain solar panels and lamps, and without someone to pass on their expertise to the next generation.

Old women are embedded in their communities, taking care of children and playing a key role in all domestic operations, including energy use.

The solar grannies, most of whom are illiterate, complete a six-month training course at the Barefoot College before returning to their homes armed with screwdrivers, batteries, circuit boards, light bulbs and a new sense of (well-deserved) self-respect.

3. One Woman Who Just Had No Time For That Oil and Gas Business

This one is just a brilliantly simple bit of solar tech that’s in use in sixteen countries on five continents, invented by Eden Full Goh, a young American woman who didn't feel comfortable being funneled into the oil and gas sector as most of her fellow engineering students are expected to do – which makes sense, as polls show that women tend to care more about climate change than men do.
Instead she chose to build on an idea she had in high school – how to make solar panels track the sun efficiently. The product she ended up with uses bottles of water and gravity to slowly tilt the solar panel over the course of the day, which increases output by 30% without using any extra power. It also provides 4 liters of clean drinking water in the process, filtering the water out of the weights and into a receptacle ready for drinking.

Increased output means less solar panels, which saves people money and saves the energy it takes to make solar panels. People in impoverished off-grid areas often have to choose between spending their little income on energy or clean water – this way, they get both for less.

The gender imbalance in the energy industry is a big problem.

In the UK, more than two-thirds of the 100 biggest energy companies fail to count a single woman on their boards, and fossil fuels are the worst culprits: while women occupy 17% of board seats for power and renewables firms, the oil and gas sector manages a pathetic 7%. Is that because fewer women are interested in careers with businesses that directly contribute to planetary meltdown, or because the kind of people who run fossil fuel companies are also the kind of people who would only hire women as secretaries? Who knows.