Young Australians have the most skin in the game when it comes to the fight for a safe future, and have understandably been on the frontlines of the fight for urgent climate action and climate justice. Yet, often when young women do so they are stereotyped as being too idealistic or lacking an understanding of ‘how the world really works’.
You only need to look at the media commentary around the School Strike for Climate movement, which is largely led by young women, to see this in action. Worse, there is often outright impatience for the growing group of young women who rightly point out that efforts to adapt to, and address climate change, should pay more attention to the complex links between climate change and gender.
Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change. They make up 80 per cent of the people displaced by extreme weather events such as heatwaves, bushfires, floods, and drought. When these disasters strike, women are also more likely to be injured, less likely to survive, and face greater hardships in accessing relief and recovery support.
Some young women and girls may also be forced to leave school to help with agricultural and gathering responsibilities as climate change makes it harder for women to do these tasks in areas closer to their homes, making them more vulnerable to gender-based violence the further they travel.
While women bear the brunt of worsening climate change impacts, we regularly see executive decisions and policies being made in boardrooms and political spheres—both of which are male-dominated spaces—which exacerbate the climate crisis and perpetuate gender inequity.
I am acutely aware of this injustice as I spend my working life advocating for better policies to tackle the climate crisis – like building a fully renewable energy system, driving a shift to cleaner transport options, and ending Australia’s reliance on polluting coal, oil, and gas.
It’s remarkable how often this still means being in rooms mostly full of men in suits (and the occasional hi-vis). The energy, transport and industrial sectors will be critical to Australia’s successful transformation to a zero emissions powerhouse. Given the outsize impacts of climate change on women, and the incredible leadership we are already seeing from women calling for climate action, it’s not good enough that the spaces where these conversations are happening continue to be so male-dominated.
Of course there are plenty of wonderful, inspiring Australian women who are leaders on climate policy and action – like Seed Mob’s Amelia Telford, Anjali Sharma who took the federal government to court to fight for a duty of care to protect young people from climate change, and Climate Council’s own CEO Amanda McKenzie among them.
But if we want to see climate action that is both urgent and equitable, then we must create many more opportunities for young women to be part of these conversations wherever they are happening, so they can shape the kind of society they want to live in.
We need more young women thinking through the challenges of electrifying everything; working out how we can support and enable Australians to move around differently; and building the industries that will power our future prosperity beyond coal and gas.
We need more young women in these spaces both because they will bring fresh perspectives to help us tackle these challenges, and because they will call out issues specific to the intersection of climate and gender that we’re often not even properly talking about yet.
So if you’re an executive in the energy sector, a transport firm, or a big industrial emitter, ask yourself: where and how am I creating the space for young women to contribute to the urgent work ahead of us in designing Australia’s zero emissions future? How can my company be part of building a world which is not just cleaner, but fairer at the same time?
And if you’re a young woman wondering where to make a difference, consider this your call up: we need your voices, we want your views, and your work in these sectors could genuinely change our shared future for the better. A future that’s safe and inclusive for all of us.