A few days ago, while taking a break from work, I stumbled upon the story of one blogger. While dreaming of their hypothetical future house, they went to take a look at solar panels to reduce their energy use. They were in the middle of Home Depot, when suddenly one guy decided it was his job to loudly interrupt them, and tell the blogger that clearly, fossil fuels are the masculine option for energy, which means that renewable energy is feminine. And if this blogger didn’t want to end up having some sissy girly house, they should get a gas-powered generator instead [1]. Fortunately, this blogger reacted with baffled incomprehension at this ridiculous idea, and didn’t seem to discouraged from getting solar panels as soon as they have the time and money to actually buy a house.
However, it was an interesting insight into a point of view I had never imagined before, that there were in fact people (often men, probably conservatives) who did not like renewable energy simply because we as humans decided to assign a female gender to it. Of course humans have always assigned genders to objects. The sea is a cruel mistress, cars are Betsy, Baby or Bertha (more women name their cars than men, and are also more likely to associate them with a female gender [2]). The German language, as well as many others, even assigns a grammatical gender to every noun. So the fact that sustainable and renewable energy has a ‘gender identity’ is not weird or the problem. What is the problem is that some people see one of these genders as lesser. If you believe that one gender has nothing to offer, then by extension everything connected with that gender is also untrustworthy.
And I am not the only one who has noticed this split. A simple google search will lead you to publications such as ‘Gender Equality and Sustainable development’ [3], ‘Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America’[4] or ‘Are women the key to Sustainable Development?’ [5].
Gender inequality has in fact been linked to achieving sustainable development in all of these publications. Getting both men and women involved doubles the number of minds who can work on the complicated problem of sustainable development, and women do have a lot to bring to the table here.
But the main goal of this story was to make people aware that men like this exist, good ol’ boys who seem to believe that anything connected to femininity is circumspect, and diminishes their masculinity, which means they should avoid it. Even if the only connection that can be found is through the weird twists of our language’s grammatical system. And while it’s rare to meet a man like that in Home Depot, they still exist, and I wonder how many anti-sustainable lobbyists and politicians and anyone else, indeed feels this way, even subconsciously. What does this tell us about those places where sustainable development has not managed to get a foothold yet, and how can this help us in the battle for sustainability?
[1] bibliophile20.tumblr.com. (2015). Gender Binary. Retrieved November 25th,, 2015, from
http://bibliophile20.tumblr.com/post/132363312576/you-know-how-the-gender-binary-
is-so-strong-that
[2] The Automobile Association. (2014). The most popular car names Retrieved November
26th, 2015, from https://www.theaa.com/newsroom/news-2014/most-popular-
car-names.html
[3] United Nations Women. (2014). Gender Equality and Sustainable Development. United
Nations publication: United Nations.
[4] Cruz-Torres, M. L., & McElwee, P. (2012). Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia
and Latin America: University of Arizona Press.
[5] Stevens, C. (2014). Are Women the Key to Sustainable Development? Sustainable
Development Insights.
[image] Shaffer, D. (2014). N.D. oil production tops 1 million-barrels-a-day milestone,
StarTribune. Retrieved from http://www.startribune.com/n-d-oil-production-tops-1-
million-barrels-a-day-milestone/263507621/