Gender in sustainability research: Inclusion, intersectionality, and patterns of knowledge production

Abstract

This cross-disciplinary study examines gender inclusion and intersectionality in the knowledge production of sustainability research. Building on studies of gender inclusion as essential for quality research, we develop a three-step framework that analyzes the socio-demographic profile of researchers (sustainability by whom?), key research trajectories (sustainability of what?), and beneficiaries of sustainability research (sustainability for whom?). Our methods include a survey and a bibliometric analysis. The survey was administered at the joint conference of the International Society for Industrial Ecology and the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology in 2017. The survey results show gendered differences in collaboration patterns.The survey results also indicated a good level of gender inclusion among the experts in this field, but the bibliometric analysis showed that gender issues remain marginal in the studies of industrial ecology. In contrast to industrial ecology, we found increasing attention to gender in other areas of sustainability research (climate change, corporate social responsibility, food production, resource management, energy policy, and environmental behavior and education), but even there, "gender" tends to be equated with "women" in traditional gender roles, ignoring the role of intersectionality-the intersection of gender with income, age, and other demographic characteristics. Therefore, this study makes recommendations to approach gender critically, by using theoretical lenses from gender studies scholarship (i.e., gender as a constructed, intersectional, dynamic category). We show how these lenses enable better assessments of the environmental impacts of industrial processes on people of diverse backgrounds in the context of changing patterns of work and consumption.

Winners of the 2021 Graedel Prizes: The Journal of Industrial Ecology Best Paper Prizes

“…Climate change‐‐related papers were quite prominent, including a study of carbon emissions for seventy‐nine cities of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (Wiedmann et al., 2021) and a scenario analysis of deep decarbonization in Germany incorporating material efficiency (Pauliuk & Heeren, 2021). Other Research and Analysis papers were: a life cycle assessment of lithium‐ion battery recycling using pyrometallurgical technologies (Rajaeifar et al., 2021); a review of critiques of the circular economy (Corvellec et al., 2021); and a study of gender in industrial ecology research (Khalikova et al., 2021). The two other nominated papers were in the category of Methods, Tools, Data and Software ; these described the construction of global physical input–output tables in a virtual laboratory (Wieland et al., 2021); and development of methodology and a personalized tool for minimizing environmental impacts while achieving a healthy diet and nutritional preferences (Walker et al., 2021).…”

Women in sustainability research: Examining gender authorship differences in peer-reviewed publications

“…Dropout rates are usually higher in women, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), called "the leaky pipeline" phenomenon (Grogan, 2019). It should be noted that academia is not a unified culture, where every research discipline has its own characteristics regarding gender differences in, for example, publications and citations (Ghiasi et al, 2015), international collaboration (Paul-Hus et al, 2015;Aksnes et al, 2019), and between countries (Larivière et al, 2013;Khalikova et al, 2021).…”

“…In particular, in sustainability research, which is transdisciplinary, there have been limited studies on the role of women, except for Khalikova et al (2021), who surveyed with a captive sample and a bibliometric analysis, to study the role of gender in sustainability research. Their results focused on the environmental dimension of sustainability in topics linked to industrial ecology.…”

“…As a consequence of these two phenomena, there has been limited research on the contribution of women to sustainability research, particularly in scientific publications, which are a key indicator of scientific outputs (Huang et al, 2020), except for the paper by Khalikova et al (2021). This article aims to fill this gap through the analysis of the role of women in sustainability peer-review publications in Europe.…”

Voicing resilience through subjective well-being: community perspectives on responding to water stressors and COVID-19

“…These stressors were rooted partly in climate change, but also in persistent challenges in service delivery, especially in lowincome areas where the unresolved legacy of race-based spatial inequality curtailed many households' ability to cope (Smith and Hanson 2003, Millington and Scheba 2021). In such situations, inadequately representing interacting social and environmental stressors risks causing generalizations about communities' vulnerability by overlooking links between power imbalances and impacts on community members (Arora-Jonsson 2011, Hellberg 2017, Khalikova et al 2021. When applied to water-stressed environments, these generalizations fail to account for geographical marginalization and disproportionate exposure to flooding, pollution, and poor drainage (Allen et al 2017) or the use of standardized measures of water accessibility that omit bespoke service provisioning common in informal settlements (Zawahri et al 2011, Adams et al 2020.…”