The Tribune

By Ian Bethell-Bennet

Irma has gone for good, José is still ruminating somewhere out there in the Atlantic and we still have a number of weeks left in the Atlantic Hurricane Season of 2017. That does not mean that an out-of-season storm could not churn up unexpectedly, however. At the moment we’ve all got our eye on Tropical Storm Maria which may be heading the Bahamas way.

After the storms have passed it’s time to think about a number of factors from the devastation they can leave behind.

As we know, gender is the social continuum on which we peg male and female behaviour. Gender is socially constructed and used to control the ways people carry themselves based on their sex. Masculine behaviour resides at one end of the social continuum and feminine behaviour at the other. Be that as it may, people tend to feel more comfortable using the word gender to mean sex than using the word sex to describe an individual’s sex.

We consider the impact being female has on one’s experience in the wake of the storm. Firstly, we know that women are more often and more negatively impacted by natural disasters because they are women.

What does that mean?

Given that over 50 percent of households are headed by single women, women will make up the bulk of those who will be looking for assistance in rebuilding and fixing homes after a hurricane’s devastation. Sadly, many unscrupulous charlatans use this as a time to descend and prey on unsuspecting women because of our cultural beliefs and ideas that women are inferior and do not understand construction or business. This is far from fact, but so many use their skills to do bad rather than good, we are left wondering who really is inferior.

To offer an example of unscrupulous ‘masculine- identified’ behaviour, offering to fix a roof at above premium prices and when the work is underway not taking off the plastic strip from the shingles so that they adhere to one another and so do not fly off the roof at the first storm, not nailing down the shingles in the correct way so that shingles stay affixed. So often nails will be bent and or not fully hammered in, or not put in the correct part of the shingle. The idea is that women will not know because they won’t recognize shoddy work. Women are not expected to get out on the roof and inspect the work.

Price gouging.

So many contractors and roofers, not to mention suppliers use back-end pricing to get away with commercial murder when it comes to work they do. They use a combination of low-quality, cheap materials to do work and then hike up the price after they have completed the work, because, so often they can claim their work took longer, materials were not available or that they had to buy more because the job was bigger than initially thought. Red flags. So, the price on the back end of the work bares little to no resemblance to the price offered before work began.

Nationally we do not manage this kind of criminality. We justify this kind of behaviour by justifying the crude and outdated gender stereotypes that we hold near and dear. It is also significant that some men who grew up in a home with a single mother tend to be as or more demonstrative of such attitudes and behaviours towards women, even while using their skills to convince women otherwise.

The larger picture.

Women are, for the most part, the sole bread winners in their homes, especially if they are single parents, in relationships where the male is abusive, unemployed or under-employed or an addict and so unable to contribute to the home, and so the burden falls on them to rebuild.In the face of adversity, these women, who are usually already working two jobs, will be made to look for more employment.

Given their status as lower-wage earners, they are less likely to live in more solidly constructed homes, especially if they are in the lower-working-class cycle of teenage pregnancy after teenage pregnancy where grandmother, mother, and daughter have followed in this line. Of course, this trend is greatly class determined. More single-headed households tend to be found among the working classes for various socio-economic, sociological and historical reasons.

More poor women tend to inhabit areas more prone to flooding and poor drainage and to be less well serviced by government agencies than others. The need for spatial justice as used by Edward Soja can be employed in this context; better stated, the reality of spatial injustice becomes apparent.

Single, working-class women with multiple children tend to be at the bottom of the housing ladder and they also tend to be ignored by the society at large because of the sentiment that they created their own realty. Patterns of behaviour and life are extremely hard to break. This is called generational poverty, even if it is ‘invisible’ to the untrained eye.

As these women and others struggle to keep work in order to pay bills and to put food on tables, they are required to be more present in jobs that will usually only pay them a sub-standard wage for the hours that they do work. They do not get sick leave, holiday nor other benefits. They are therefore not able to devote time to children or childcare and find their lives spiraling out of control. As prices rise in the wake of natural disasters, these are the very people who are most affected by changes in insurance, if they can still afford it, increased electricity bills, as is common nowadays and increased food costs.

As prices increase, these women are less able to provide good-quality, inexpensive food for their children and themselves, so the reality of potential failure of the next generation increases. Cheap, low-quality food such as boxed Macaroni Dinner, tuna filled with mercury, corned beef filled with salt, Ramen Noodles filled with everything artificial and harmful, only further exacerbates the downward spiral.

Ultimately, we reproduce a culture that has never sustained black, working-class women. It does not value women, and they are the primary informal-working people in the community because they run more households and must scrimp and save and invent. Further, our attitudes justify the exploitation of women by paying them little, charging them more, and demanding high rates for poor work.

Natural disasters wreak havoc on women who are positioned as the sole breadwinners because of the disappearance of the typical or traditional Caribbean safety net and fabric of family and kinship networks. As these storms become an increasing part of our daily realities, women will more often fall into deeper poverty and so their children will be that much more unlikely to succeed, the curse becomes generational. Perhaps we should explore the aftermath of these three last hurricanes to produce local work on the gendered impact of natural disasters on The Bahamas.