Gender gaps as unknowns or un-knowings? Engendering development and disasters in an extractivist landscape

Despite the dominance of ‘smart economics’, what we know about women’s poverty remains limited, and what we know about other areas of women’s lives, and deaths, even more so. More and better gendered data is often presented as a way to improve policy response. This article questions whether the real problem is that policymakers do not know, or whether they do not want to know, highlighting a distinction between the unknown and un-knowing. It takes a disasters lens to engendering to provide a new perspective on an old issue. The article highlights how the current neoliberal model’s extractivist logic creates the environmental conditions that produce ‘natural’ hazards, and the human conditions – gender and other inequalities – that produce vulnerabilities, which, combined, create disasters. Disaster Risk Creation is built into the global socio-economic system as an integral component, not accidental by-product. If a gender approach operates within this extractivist paradigm, it runs the risk of furthering extractivism, depleting the resources of women – for what and whose gain? The article argues that, if they are to have any legitimacy, Gender and Development and Gender and Disasters should focus on questioning ideas of development and disasters, as much as promoting gender.

© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.