Gender

Research on the exposure of women to several types of natural hazards has shown that gender inequality may increase their risk of being negatively affected. For instance, in the developing world, people living below the poverty line face the greatest exposure to natural hazards; seventy percent of people living in this condition are women. Moreover, several of them are housewives in charge of household chores and raising children. This makes the impact of disasters not gender neutral as their dwellings tend to be highly vulnerable to natural hazards, and women spend more time at home than men.

This part of the project has been oriented to analyze the consequences of these facts in the face of potential disasters produced by earthquakes. To do so, several earthquake scenarios have been simulated by considering the uncertainties related to modelling exposure and seismic hazard in vulnerable urban environments. To quantify how much longer women stay in vulnerable dwellings than men, it has been analyzed the general use of time of citizen. In particular, data on household activities has been of greatest interest for this research. Forecasts show that in case of a catastrophe produced by an earthquake, women have a higher probability of being negatively affected than men.