http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Article=5099

Women worst hit by Katrina

"As the media coverage of the disaster in New Orleans swung into high gear,
reporters started to notice the racial dynamics of Hurricane Katrina's
aftermath," wrote Joni Seager, dean of York's Faculty of Environmental
Studies, in an op-ed piece Sept. 14 in the Chicago-Tribune. "And yet there
is another equally important and starkly apparent social dimension to the
hurricane disaster that media coverage has put in front of our eyes but
that has yet to be 'noticed': This disaster fell hard on one side of the
gender line too. Most of the survivors are women. Women with children,
women on their own, elderly women in wheelchairs, women everywhere – by a
proportion of what looks to be somewhere around 75 or 80 per cent," pointed
out Seager.

"The gender gap is no surprise, or shouldn't be. Disaster is seldom gender
neutral. In the 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake, 1.5 times more women died
than men; in the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami, death rates for women across
the region averaged three to four times that of men," Seager noted.

"This knowledge appears to have entirely bypassed American commentators,
planners and media. The ‘not noticing’ of the gendered dimensions of this
disaster by the American media and by the experts who interpreted the
disaster to the public through the media is alarming and warrants
attention. Feminist theorists have long pointed to the public invisibility
of women, especially women of racial minorities, and the New Orleans case
study provides a dramatic example of the ‘unremarkability’ of racialized
minority women in the gaze of a predominantly male and white media. In the
real world of an unfolding disaster, this comes at a price," suggested
Seager.

"Media commentators and politicians insist on referring to this as a
natural disaster. There's a certain comfort and perhaps political cover in
that designation, but experts eschew this term. The hurricane came ashore,
but from then on it has been a human disaster. The gendered character of
this disaster, and the silence about it, also is more artifice than
nature," wrote Seager.