Socioeconomic consequences of natural disasters on gender relations: The case of Haiti

Abstract This paper aims to analyze how the consequences of natural disasters affect gender relations in socioeconomic terms. To meet this objective, we quantitatively analyzed the effect of the earthquake that occurred in Haiti in 2010 based on data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) developed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). To measure the impact of the 2010 earthquake we used the differences in differences (DID) technique. The estimation shows how the negative effects of the disaster differed across regions, increasing with the intensity of the earthquake's impact, and that this was significantly statistically related to the wealth of families, regardless of the gender of the head of the family. However, we also observed that these negative effects were further intensified when the head of the household was a woman, thus increasing the gap between the wealth of female- and male-headed households. The conclusions drawn from this work reinforce the idea that natural disasters have a more negative impact on women and, specifically, on the economic possibilities of female-headed households, and show that, at least in Haiti, the enormous gender inequalities that existed prior to the earthquake do not diminish postdisaster, but are indeed exaggerated. These findings have important political implications that should not be ignored.