We tend to take energy for granted –only becoming aware of it when the power is cut and we can’t turn on the AC or heating, or our car is running nearly empty and the gas station is closed. It’s the job of governments to ensure these events don’t happen. To prevent major disruptions in the energy supply, governments need to pay attention not only to the hardware components but also the people involved in producing and using energy. We need to better understand how gender, alongside other social identities, impacts the energy workforce and consumption patterns.
Women in the Energy Workforce
One aspect of ensuring the energy supply is having a large enough, skilled labor force which is a challenge for companies and governments. More than ten years ago, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) warned of a skills shortage across the renewable energy value chain. The energy industry has faced crises in skilled labor before, for example, a boom in US oil and gas extraction at the start of the 2010 decade. The problem was solved by reaching out to an untapped resource: women! Global data for 2016 indicated women formed 22% of the oil and gas sector workforce with the renewable energy value chain workforce having a slightly better female representation at approximately 35% (based on a survey of 90 companies). The under-involvement of women should be a concern for governments since the evidence indicates that the macro economy suffers if employers do not use women’s skills and talents and that a company’s financial performance improves when it diversifies its workforce. Another issue of concern is the lack of racial diversity in the workforce. In the US, Black workers form only 8% of the clean energy workforce, often earning less than their white counterparts in comparable positions.
A contributing factor to women’s lack of representation in the energy sector work force is gendered occupational segregation, beginning with a lack of women with appropriate training.
Young women often gravitate towards careers associated with strong social goals (such as teaching, nursing, social work and human resources), as opposed to engineering. Teachers’ attitudes about who should or should not study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) can also influence the choices students make. These are the subjects that are needed for a technical career in the energy sector. Researchers have consistently found that teachers attitudes can discourage girls and youth of color from pursuing study in advanced math or sciences. Parents’ opinions, which reflect their community’s norms and values, can influence career choices about what is considered appropriate employment for women. Working on an off-shore wind turbine or oil rig is often seen as dirty, dangerous, and risky – certainly not something for their daughters.
There appears to be even more limited success in getting women into the skilled occupational trades that play a key role in the energy sector, such as metal workers, insulations specialists, plumbers and pipefitters, electricians, heating and cooling technicians. The sector is perceived as a male-dominated culture with misogynistic attitudes. In the US construction sector, the employment ratio is approximately 1.3 women to 10 men. Even when employed in the construction sector, women are far more likely to work in administrative positions; the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women fill nearly 80% of the office and administrative roles in the industry.
Gender and Energy Consumption
Energy costs for a household are deeply shaped by gender and other inequalities, and in return these inequalities can have a direct impact on our health. A household’s energy bills will probably form a very significant part of monthly expenditures. One of the main factors affecting the size of the bill is the physical structure of the building which directly influences the energy efficiency of the dwelling in responding to the external climatic conditions which create heating or cooling demands. Energy costs fall more heavily on those who earn less or have less savings, typically women and people of color.
When energy costs spike, as they’re likely to do in the US following the passage of Trump’s budget bill in 2025, women will feel the impact more acutely.
In the UK – which is unique in collecting official socially disaggregated data on household energy use – as of 2015, 16.4% of ethnic minority households were spending more than 10% of their income on energy to maintain an acceptable heating level, compared to 10.4% of white households. To avoid defaulting on their bills, people change their behavior to reduce energy consumption, including cooking fewer meals or avoiding in-home socializing, resulting in greater isolation. Efforts to reduce energy consumption due to pricing concerns may be detrimental to physical and mental health.
A room’s ambient temperature affects our functioning. There comes a point when the ambient temperature is too low or too high for our body’s self-regulatory functions to be able to respond adequately, which has serious implications for our body’s physiological functioning. In northern temperate climates, more people die in the winter months compared to the summer months, a situation known as excess winter death (EWD). Women are more sensitive to ambient temperature than men. In England and Wales, in 2015-2016, more women than men died from EWD (53% to 47%). There are similar factors influencing deaths related to heat waves. At 35 years of age excess mortality begins to increase, with a difference between women and men becoming more pronounced at 45 years of when the number of excess deaths for women is 15% higher than men of comparable age. Energy decisions, such as control over ambient temperature, play an important role in gender discrepancies in weather-related deaths.
Intersectional Perspectives on Energy Policy
There are other motivational factors for reducing energy consumption than being able to pay your bills. For many, environmental concerns are paramount. The public, irrespective of gender, often holds generally positive attitudes towards renewable energy sources. One of the few studies assessing attitudes to the energy system examined six different communities in five European countries disaggregated their findings across age, gender, and socioeconomic status found uniformly positive attitudes towards renewable energy by women and men. The most significant differences in attitudes were found between the communities, rather than within them. Attitudes are shaped by cultural world views which creates tensions for Indigenous communities whose ancestral homes are located near the sites of large natural resource deposits scheduled for development such as in the oil shale regions of Alberta, Canada. Communities want to be able to pick herbs and berries, uncontaminated by effluent, for use as traditional medicine.
Women in Canada’s Indigenous communities have criticized their lack of influence over the use of their ancestral lands for oil shale exploitation, a lack which is a consequence of colonial history. To this day, environmental activism is often led by Indigenous women, although their perspectives are rarely centered in energy policy debates.
We need a healthy and appropriately educated workforce to keep the lights on. That means we need to reduce barriers to studying STEM to maintain a well-skilled energy workforce and invest in improving homes’ energy efficiency and reducing energy costs for consumers. The very limited data about who isn’t opting for energy sector jobs and who lives in energy inefficient homes shows that the person’s social characteristics, such as sex, age, and ethnicity, are key factors. If policy makers want to address these issues they need to collect and analyze more socially disaggregated data to understand what motivates people to make choices about the subjects they study, the jobs they choose, and the energy management techniques which ensure a healthy ambient temperature in their homes.
