Gender Diversity in Leadership Reduces Emissions (Scenarios Forum 2022)
Channel: ModLab: Digital Humanities Laboratory at UC Davis
Date: 2022-06-17

Presented at ICONICS Scenarios Forum, June 20-22, 2022, Laxenburg, Austria.

Presentation Title: Gender diversity in leadership reduces emissions. What does this mean for our models, and for climate communications in general?

Authors: 
Osprey Orielle Lake, Executive Director, WECAN International 
Katherine Quaid (Umatilla), WECAN International
Dawn Dietrich, Western Washington University
Samara Hayley Steele, PhD Candidate, University of California, Davis
Alisha Chan, Undergraduate Researcher, UC Davis

Speaker:
Osprey Orielle Lake, Founder and Executive Director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International

Studies in the last six years have confirmed that when women are in leadership positions in companies, governance, and society, emissions go down and ecological conservation goes up. One study that used panel data from a sample of 72 countries between 1971-2012 and found that a one unit increase in a country’s score on the women’s political empowerment index was associated with a 11.51% decrease in the country’s carbon emissions (Lv and Deng 2019). Another study found that female representation in national parliaments across 91 countries correlates with more stringent climate change policies and lower carbon emissions (Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi 2019). Likewise, a review of 17 studies from around the world found that the presence of women in conservation and natural resource management resulted in stricter and more sustainable extraction rules, greater compliance, more transparency and accountability, and better conflict resolution (Liesher et al. 2016), while another study found that firms with more women on the board are less often sued for environmental infringements (Liu 2018). This evidence indicates that disaggregation for gender diversity in leadership would better improve the predictive capacities of our models. 

Looking beyond the models themselves, we might also explore how efforts to improve gender diversity in climate discourse may ultimately aid the efforts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Presently, only 15% of the people who appear in the media to speak about climate change are women. This is despite data that confirm that, on average, women convey greater assessed scientific knowledge of climate change than do men, and women also express more concern for the climate (McCright 2010, Leiserowitz et al. 2018). The Women Speak archive, compiled by the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, offers the world’s largest archive of case studies of women- and femme- climate leaders, highlighting women around the world who are raising their voices to address climate change. As we think towards better calibrating our models to better account for the measurable impact of gender diversity in leadership upon emissions, how might we also ensure that gender diversity is supported within and beyond climate modeling communities?