Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Population and Environment
Published in: Population and Environment 3/2021

24-10-2020 | Original Paper

Drought and disproportionate disease: an investigation of gendered vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS in less-developed nations

Authors: Virginia Kuulei Berndt, Kelly F. Austin

Published in: Population and Environment | Issue 3/2021

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Environmental change and climate-related disasters are an under-examined factor impacting women’s health, globally. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, we conduct analyses examining if the HIV burden among women is higher in nations that experience suffering from droughts. Specifically, we posit that droughts, which typically impact more people and for greater lengths of time than other climate-related disasters, have a unique impact on women’s vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. We use a cross-national dataset of less-developed countries and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to explore and compare relationships between suffering from drought and total HIV prevalence and suffering from drought and women’s proportion of HIV cases. Overall, the results demonstrate that while droughts have an inconsistent impact on total HIV prevalence, suffering from drought significantly increases the proportion of HIV cases among women in comparison to men, net of the impact of common economic, social, cultural, and political predictors. The findings suggest that suffering from drought differentially impacts women’s health in less-developed countries, where a number of mechanisms, such as transactional sex or displacement, likely underlie the associations identified.
previous article Comparative assessment of gridded population data sets for complex topography: a study of Southwest China
next article Real-time information on air pollution and avoidance behavior: evidence from South Korea

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Throughout this article, less-developed countries are defined as countries falling within the lower three quartiles of the World Bank income classification of countries, which is based on per capita GDP.
 
2
Other types of transactional sex exist and are important to consider, including sex for improvement of social status and sex for material expressions of love (Mojola 2014; Stoebenau et al. 2016) through securing of material goods rather than food (Leclerc-Madlala 2008; Wamoyi et al. 2010, 2019). However, regardless of the motivations being for basic survival items or for more luxury items, we emphasize that devastation from drought may encourage women to engage in transactional sex to obtain the things they need or want.
 
3
We acknowledge that violent conflict also likely exacerbates the effects of drought and is also a major contributor to displacement. Droughts are likely to be acutely devastating in nations with pre-existing conflict (e.g., Somalia). While relevant to ideas about displacement and IDP camps, we prefer to focus on drought rather than conflict in the current manuscript for the sake of parsimony, and as the relationship between drought and HIV is a new line of research which first deserves a fundamental approach. Certainly, considering the role of conflict alongside these themes represents an avenue for future research.
 
4
We employed a number of diagnostic tests, including Cook’s D, Breush-Pagan, and modified White’s tests to examine potential patterns in heteroscedasticity, the existence of outliers, etc.
 
5
We follow Paul Allison (2012), where he conservatively recommends concerns over multicollinearity when individual VIFs exceed 2.5.
 
6
We also considered other time-lags (e.g., 4–8-year lags) used in prior research and obtained consistent results.
 
7
We also tested all models using the complete sample of 65 cases. The results were entirely consistent with those presented here. However, we prefer to present models on as many cases as possible; thus, we retained all 69 cases in the sample and only have a reduced sample size for those models including number of trained health workers.
 
8
We also considered analyses predicting female HIV prevalence. However, these models did not yield any interesting or new results. Austin and Noble (2014) provide a clear discussion and analysis of women’s HIV prevalence versus women’s proportion of HIV cases, demonstrating that total prevalence and female prevalence of HIV are correlated at 0.99 in cross-national data and that analyses of female prevalence rates do not appropriately capture the drivers of women’s disproportionate vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. We also utilized data on female HIV prevalence and found consistent results with those presented here for total HIV prevalence. We focused our analyses to presenting the findings for total HIV prevalence and women’s proportion of the population living with HIV for parsimony and to more succinctly demonstrate environmental change as a gendered health issue.
 
9
We also tried additional time windows when calculating the droughts measure, ranging from 3 to 15 years. The impacts of droughts on women’s proportion of the population living with HIV and total HIV prevalence were overwhelmingly consistent with the results presented here regardless of the timespan used to measure the variable.
 
10
We also tested models with additional control variables related to women’s empowerment, including fertility rates, the percent of births attended by trained health staff, female primary school enrollments, and the Gender Inequality Index. These models were excluded from the main results for the sake of parsimony, but they are available in the Appendix Table 5.
 
11
In early models, we also tested for the influence of the other key macro-regions represented by the countries in the sample, including Latin America and Southeast Asia. However, the dummy indicators for these two regions were non-significant.
 
Literature
Allison, P. (1999). Multiple regression: a primer. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.
Arku, F. S., & Arku, C. (2010). I cannot drink water on an empty stomach: a gender perspective on living with drought. Gend Dev, 18(1), 115–124.
Austin, K. F., & Noble, M. D. (2014). Measuring gender disparity in the HIV pandemic: a cross-national investigation of female empowerment, inequality, and disease in less-developed nations. Sociol Inq, 84(1), 102–130.
Austin, K. F., & McKinney, L. (2016). Disaster devastation in poor countries: the direct and indirect effects of ecological losses, gender inequality, and development. Social Forces, 95(1), 355–380.
Austin, K. F., Choi, M., & Berndt, V. (2017). Trading sex for security: unemployment and the unequal HIV burden among young women in developing nations. Int Sociol, 32(3), 343–368.
Austin, J., Guy, S., Lee-Jones, L., McGinn, T., & Schlecht, J. (2008). Reproductive health: a right for refugees and internally displaced persons. Reproductive Health Matters, 16(31), 10–21.
Bose, C. E. (2011). Eastern sociological society presidential address: globalizing gender issues: many voices, different choices. Sociol Forum, 26(4), 739–753.
Braun, Y. A. (2011). Drought. In M. Z. Strange, C. K. Oyster, & J. E. Sloan (Eds.), The multimedia encyclopedia of women in today’s world (pp. 427–428). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Burroway, R. (2010). Schools against AIDS: secondary school enrollment and cross-national disparities in AIDS death rates. Soc Probl, 57(3), 398–420.
Burroway, R. (2012). A cross-national analysis of sex-specific HIV prevalence rates and women’s access to property, land, and loans in developing countries. Int J Sociol, 42(2), 47–67.
Campbell, J. C., Baty, M. L., Ghandour, R. M., Stockman, J. K., Francisco, L., & Wagman, J. (2008). The intersection of intimate partner violence against women and HIV/AIDS: a review. Int J Inj Control Saf Promot, 15(4), 221–231.
Cook, B. I., Mankin, J. S., & Anchukaitis, K. J. (2018). Climate change and drought: from past to future. Current Climate Change Reports, 4(2), 164–170.
CRED (Centre for the Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters). (2019). Disasters in Africa: 20 year review (2000-2019). CRED Crunch, 56, 1–2.
Denton, F. (2002). Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: why does gender matter? Gend Dev, 10(2), 10–20.
Dunaway, W. A., & Macabuac, M. C. (2007). “The shrimp eat better than we do”: Philippine subsistence fishing households sacrificed for the global food chain. Review, 30(4), 313–327.
Dunkle, K. L., Jewkes, R. K., Brown, H. C., Gray, G. E., McIntryre, J. A., & Harlow, S. D. (2004). Transactional sex among women in Soweto, South Africa: prevalence, risk factors and association with HIV infection. Soc Sci Med, 59(8), 1581–1592.
Eaton, H., & Lorentzen, L. A. (2003). Ecofeminism & globalization: exploring culture, context, and religion. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Elmhirst, R. (2011). Introducing new feminist political ecologies. Geoforum, 42(2), 129–132.
Enarson, E., Fothergill, A., & Peek, L. (2018). Gender and disaster: foundations and new direction for research and practice. In H. Rodriguez, W. Donner, & J. E. Trainor (Eds.), Handbook of disaster research (2nd ed., pp. 205–233). New York: Springer.
Ergas, C., & York, R. (2012). Women’s status and carbon dioxide emissions: a quantitative cross-national analysis. Soc Sci Res, 41(4), 965–976.
Fisher, M., & Carr, E. R. (2015). The influence of gendered roles and responsibilities on the adoption of technologies that mitigate drought risk: the case of drought-tolerant maize seed in Eastern Uganda. Glob Environ Chang, 35, 82–92.
Fothergill, A., & Peek, L. (2004). Poverty and disasters in the United States: a review of recent sociological findings. Nat Hazards, 32, 89–110.
Frank, E., & Unruh, J. (2008). Demarcating forest, containing disease: land and HIV/AIDS in southern Zambia. Popul Environ, 29(3), 108–132.
Gaard, G. (2011). Ecofeminism revisited: rejecting essentialism and re-placing species in a material feminist environmentalism. Fem Form, 23(2), 26–53.
Gaard, G. (2015). Ecofeminism and climate change. Women's Stud Int Forum, 49, 20–33.
Gaard, G. (2017). Critical ecofeminism. NY: Lexington.
Godfrey, P. C. (2012). Introduction: race, gender & class and climate change. Race, Gender & Class, 19(1/2), 3–11.
Gray, P. B. (2004). HIV and Islam: is HIV prevalence lower among Muslims? Soc Sci Med, 58(9), 1751–1756.
Guha-Sapir, D. (2012). Disaster data: a balanced perspective. CRED Crunch, 28, 1–2.
Hankivsky, O. (2012). Women’s health, men’s health, and gender and health: Implications of intersectionality. Soc Sci Med, 74, 1712–1720.
Harlan, S. L., Pellow, D. N., Roberts, J. T., Bell, S. E., Holt, W. G., & Nagel, J. (2015). Climate justice and inequality. In R. E. Dunlap & R. J. Brulle (Eds.), Climate change and society: sociological perspectives (pp. 127–163). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heimer, C. A. (2007). Old inequalities, new disease: HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Annu Rev Sociol, 33, 551–577.
Horton, L. (2012). After the earthquake: gender inequality and transformation in post-disaster Haiti. Gend Dev, 20(2), 295–308.
Hunter, L. M., Reid-Hresko, J., & Dickinson, T. W. (2011). Environmental change, risky sexual behavior, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic: linkages through livelihoods in rural Haiti. Popul Res Policy Rev, 30(5), 729–750.
King, Y. (1999). Ecofeminism. In W. P. Mankiller, G. Mink, M. Navarro, B. Smith, & G. Steinem (Eds.), The reader’s companion to U.S. women’s history (p. 207). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Leclerc-Madlala, S. (2008). Transactional sex and the pursuit of modernity. Soc Dyn, 29(2), 213–233.
Majid, N., & McDowell, S. (2012). Hidden dimensions of the Somalia famine. Global Food Security, 1(1), 36–42.
Maynard, G., & Ong, C. (2016). Economic dependency and HIV/AIDS prevalence in the developing world: a comparative, longitudinal analysis. Sociol Inq, 86(2), 189–216.
McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs, 30(3), 1771–1900.
McCleary-Sills, J., Douglas, Z., Rwehumbiza, A., Hamisi, A., & Mabala, R. (2013). Gendered norms, sexual exploitation and adolescent pregnancy in rural Tanzania. Reproductive Health Matters, 21(41), 97–105.
McIntosh, W. A., & Thomas, J. K. (2004). Economic and other societal determinants of the prevalence of HIV: a testing of competing hypotheses. Sociol Q, 45(2), 303–324.
McKinney, L. (2014). Gender, democracy, development, and overshoot: a cross-national analysis. Popul Environ, 36(2), 193–218.
McKinney, L., & Austin, K. (2015). Ecological losses are harming women: a structural analysis of female HIV prevalence and life expectancy in less developed countries. Soc Probl, 62, 529–549.
Mies, M. (1998). Patriarchy & accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labor. New York: Zed Books.
Mies, M., & Shiva, V. (1993). Ecofeminism. New York: Zed Books.
Mojola, S. A. (2011). Fishing in dangerous waters: Ecology, gender and economy in HIV risk. Soc Sci Med, 72(2), 149–156.
Mojola, S. A. (2014). Love, money, and HIV: becoming a modern African woman in the age of AIDS. Oakland: University of California Press.
Mosavel, M., Ahmed, R., & Simon, C. (2012). Perceptions of gender-based violence among south African youth: implications for health promotion interventions. Health Promot Int, 27(3), 323–330.
Murray, A. F. (2013). From outrage to courage: the unjust and unhealthy situation of women in poorer countries and what they are doing about it. Menlo Park: Anne Firth Murray.
Neumayer, E., & Plümper, T. (2007). The gendered nature of natural disasters: The impact of catastrophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy, 1981-2002. Ann Assoc Am Geogr, 97(3), 551–566.
Norgaard, K., & York, R. (2005). Gender equality and state environmentalism. Gend Soc, 19(4), 506–522.
Ocello, C., Petrucci, A., Testa, M. R., & Vignoli, D. (2015). Environmental aspects of internal migration in Tanzania. Popul Environ, 37, 99–108.
Oglethorpe, J., & Gelman, N. (2008). AIDS, women, land, and natural resources in Africa: current challenges. Gend Dev, 16(1), 85–100.
Oyefara, J. L. (2007). Food insecurity, HIV/AIDS pandemic and sexual behaviour of female commercial sex workers in Lagos metropolis, Nigeria. SAHARA-J: Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS, 4(2), 626–635.
Pascoe, S. J. S., Langhaug, L. F., Mavhu, W., Hargreaves, J., Jaffar, S., Hayes, R., & Cowan, F. M. (2015). Poverty, food insufficiency and HIV infection and sexual behaviour among young rural Zimbabwean women. PLoS One, 10(1), e0115290.
Quinn, T. C., & Overbaugh, J. (2005). HIV/AIDS in women: an expanding epidemic. Science, 308(5728), 1582–1583.
Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B., & Wangari, E. (1996). Feminist Political Ecology: Global issues and local experiences. New York: Routledge.
Sam, A. S., Abbas, A., Padmaja, S. S., Kaechele, H., Kumar, R., & Müller, K. (2019). Linking food security with household’s adaptive capacity and drought risk: Implications for sustainable rural development. Soc Indic Res, 142, 363–385.
Shandra, J. M., Shandra, C. L., & London, B. (2008). Women, non-governmental organizations, and deforestation: a cross-national study. Popul Environ, 30(1/2), 48–72.
Shircliff, E. J., & Shandra, J. M. (2011). Non-governmental organizations, democracy, and HIV prevalence: a cross-national analysis. Sociol Inq, 81(2), 143–173.
Shukla, A. (2014). Drought + politics = famine in Somalia. Int J Innov Appl Stud, 6(4), 1104–1110.
Smith, M. K. (2002). Gender, poverty, and intergenerational vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. Gend Dev, 10(3), 63–70.
Steinberg, T. (2000). Acts of god: the unnatural history of natural disaster in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stoebenau, K., Heise, L., Wamoyi, J., & Bobrova, N. (2016). Revisiting the understanding of “transactional sex” in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review and synthesis of the literature. Soc Sci Med, 168, 186–197.
Terry, G. (2009). No climate justice without gender justice: an overview of the issues. Gend Dev, 17(1), 5–18.
Tierney, K. (2007). From the margins to the mainstream? Disaster research at the crossroads. Annu Rev Sociol, 33, 503–525.
Tschumi, E., & Zscheischler, J. (2020). Countrywide climate features during recorded climate-related disasters. Clim Chang, 158, 593–609.
Wamoyi, J., Wight, D., Plummer, M., Mshana, G. H., & Ross, D. (2010). Transactional sex amongst young people in rural northern Tanzania: an ethnography of young women’s motivations and negotiation. Reprod Health, 7(2), 1–18.
Wamoyi, J., Ranganathan, M., Kyegombe, N., & Stoebenau, K. (2019). Improving the measurement of transactional sex in Sub-Saharan Africa: a critical review. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr, 80(4), 367–374.
Warren, K. J. (1990). The power and the promise of ecological feminism. Environmental Ethics, 12(2), 125–146.
Weiser, S. D., Leiter, K., Bangsberg, D. R., Butler, L. M., Percy-de Korte, F., Hlanze, Z., Phaladze, N., Iacopino, V., & Heisle, M. (2007). Food insufficiency is associated with high-risk sexual behavior among women in Botswana and Swaziland. PLoS Med, 4(10), 1589–1598.
Williams, T. P., Binagwaho, A., & Betancourt, T. S. (2012). Transactional sex as a form of child sexual exploitation and abuse in Rwanda: implications for child security and protection. Child Abuse Negl, 36(4), 354–361.
Metadata
Title
Drought and disproportionate disease: an investigation of gendered vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS in less-developed nations
Authors
Virginia Kuulei Berndt
Kelly F. Austin
Publication date
24-10-2020
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Population and Environment / Issue 3/2021
Print ISSN: 0199-0039
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7810
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-020-00367-1

Other articles of this Issue 3/2021

Population and Environment 3/2021 Go to the issue

Original Paper

Social change, out-migration, and exit from farming in Nepal

Original Paper

Petrochemical releases disproportionately affected socially vulnerable populations along the Texas Gulf Coast after Hurricane Harvey

Original Paper

Real-time information on air pollution and avoidance behavior: evidence from South Korea

Original Paper

Comparative assessment of gridded population data sets for complex topography: a study of Southwest China

Original Paper

Moving up the energy ladder: does socio-religious status matter?