Essays on Gender Inequalities and the Economic Impacts of Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is accelerating the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods, heatwaves, and droughts. In 2019 alone, 4.5 billion people were exposed to extreme weather events, marking a 12% increase from 2010, with South Asia as the hardest hit region (Doan et al., 2023). These climate shocks affect various dimensions of a household’s well-being, such as finances, livelihoods, and health, with the potential to reverse hard-won social and economic gains. They have particularly severe consequences for women, who are often at the frontline of climate crises due to existing social and economic inequalities. This dissertation examines the ways in which climate change intersects with gender inequalities across multiple dimensions: within the household, during critical life stages, and through policy efforts to bridge gender gaps in educational attainment. Specifically, the three chapters explore how climate shocks affect the distribution of household resources among members (Chapter 1), how extreme heat experienced by mothers during pregnancy affects children’s early-life health (Chapter 2), and how government programs can close gender gaps in secondary education attainment (Chapter 3). Chapters 1 and 2 directly investigate the economic and health impacts of climate change, while Chapter 3 focuses on gender inequality in education—a barrier that affects women’s economic opportunities and may indirectly influence their capacity to adapt to climate shocks in the future. Together, these chapters highlight the interconnectedness of climate change, economic vulnerability, and gender inequality in climate-vulnerable settings. Chapter 1 examines how climate shocks can have heterogeneous effects on household members' well-being by examining the impact of floods on intra-household resource allocation in Bangladesh, one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. While much of the existing climate-economy literature examines the effect of climate shocks on household-level consumption (Karim and Noy, 2016), this chapter demonstrates that women’s and children’s material well-being deteriorates relative to that of men in the same household as the share of the household budget available to them declines, while the share allocated to men increases. As the division of the household budget among members is not directly observable, I specify a structural model to estimate the shares of the household budget allocated to men, women, and children and leverage quasi-random variation in flood exposure to examine how these shares respond to a flood shock over time. Using panel data on households combined with geospatial data on flooding, I show that exposure to a flood leads to a reallocation of resources away from women and children—primarily women—toward men, with effects persisting even four years after the shock. As a result, women and children face a greater risk of falling below the poverty line compared to men living under the same roof. This reallocation of resources is driven by a decline in employment opportunities for women, leading to a decrease in their earnings relative to men’s after the flood, as women are less able to transition to alternative occupations. While both men and women are less likely to work in farming after the flood, men can compensate by working as day laborers, an option less available to women in this context. This limited adaptability for women highlights gendered economic vulnerabilities that climate shocks exacerbate, underscoring the importance of integrating gender-sensitive labor market support into climate resilience efforts to mitigate these hidden intrahousehold inequalities. Chapter 2 examines how exposure to extremely hot temperatures during pregnancy affects children’s early-life health, which can contribute to long-term economic and social inequalities. This chapter also focuses on the Bangladeshi context, and uses exogenous variation in prenatal temperature experienced by cohorts of pregnant mothers who give birth in the same district and month but in different calendar years. Combining household and child-level survey data with reanalysis temperature data, I find that short-lived spikes in temperature during pregnancy do not significantly impact health in early childhood. However, more prolonged exposure to hot temperatures, especially during the third trimester, decreases their height-for-age z-score, a measure of long-term undernourishment, by 0.186 and increases their probability of stunted growth, a signal of chronic undernourishment, by 6.9 percentage points. This chapter demonstrates that one channel through which the economic and health consequences of climate change materialize is women’s exposure to extreme heat during pregnancy. Chapter 3 shifts from the direct impacts of climate shocks to examining a policy intervention aimed at reducing gender inequalities in education. In climate-vulnerable settings, improving girls’ education can be an important step toward enhancing future resilience, as education expands women’s economic opportunities and access to information. This co-authored chapter evaluates a government-administered cash transfer program in Pakistan that offered households a monthly stipend conditional on girls’ regular attendance in secondary school (grades 6 to 10). Using administrative school-level data and a regression discontinuity design that exploits the program’s eligibility cutoff based on district-level adult literacy rates, we find that the program increased girls’ secondary school enrollment consistently over more than a decade (2004-2015). These positive effects persisted despite the real value of the cash benefit decreases by more than 60%, suggesting that the program may have influenced household attitudes or contributed to shifting social norms around girls’ education. While this potential climate resilience benefit is not directly tested in this chapter, the policy’s role in reducing gender gaps in education is directly relevant to the broader inquiry into gender inequality in South Asia. These three chapters collectively illustrate the multifaceted relationship between climate change, economic impacts, and gender inequalities. Chapters 1 and 2 directly show how climate shocks—floods and heat—worsen gendered economic and health vulnerabilities within and across generations. Chapter 3 complements this by showing how policy interventions can reduce the gender gap in education, which may have long-term consequences for women’s economic and adaptive capacity in climate-vulnerable settings. Taken together, my dissertation highlights that addressing gender inequality is a necessary element of effective climate adaptation strategies in contexts where climate change and gender disparities are intertwined.