Three Components of Gender Equity and Their Relationships to Environmental Change

• In Event: 1461 - Environmental Change and Inequality

Abstract

The Carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) (a ratio measuring the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of life expectancy at birth) has become an increasingly popular way to measure the ecological efficiency of nations. Although it is known that economic development on average reduces the ecological efficiency of nations, little research has explored the extent to which social equality reduces CIWB. The present study uses panel data for 70 nations to assess how various aspects of gender equity affect the ecological efficiency of nations. Specifically, we estimate a series of Prais-Winsten regression models with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE), allowing for disturbances that are heteroskedastic and contemporaneously correlated across panels to assess how increases in the percentage of women in parliament, expected years of education for women, and the percentage of women in the labor force independently affect CIWB. Our findings indicate that across all nations, increases in the percentage of women in parliament and expected years of schooling for women reduce CIWB; however, increases in the percentage of women in the labor force increase CIWB. In developed nations, we find that increases in education reduce CIWB, while women in parliament and the labor force have no significant effect on CIWB. Meanwhile, in less developed nations, we find that women’s education has no effect on CIWB, that women in parliament reduces CIWB, and that women in the labor force increases CIWB. Further analyses demonstrate that these dimensions of gender inequality are not entirely independent of one another, and serve to moderate each other’s associations with CIWB. Specifically, we find that increases in the number of women in parliament and women’s education attenuates the relationship between women’s labor force participation and CIWB. The variation in our results are discussed using relevant literature on ecofeminism and feminist economics.

Authors

• Christina A. Ergas, University of Tennessee

• Patrick Trent Greiner, Vanderbilt University

• Julius Alexander McGee, Portland State University

• Matthew Thomas Clement, Texas State University