Men's household water fetching in India: Gender inequity is associated with greater responsibility and related risks.
Journal
American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council
ISSN: 1520-6300
Titre abrégé: Am J Hum Biol
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 8915029
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
23 Sep 2023
23 Sep 2023
Historique:
revised:
30
08
2023
received:
18
04
2023
accepted:
06
09
2023
medline:
23
9
2023
pubmed:
23
9
2023
entrez:
23
9
2023
Statut:
aheadofprint
Résumé
Household water fetching elevates physical and emotional harms, and these are generally assumed to accrue to women due to gendered labor assignments. But even in cases like India where fetching remains a highly feminized task, there are households where the primary responsibility is assumed by men. We test the proposition that men's responsibility for water fetching is predicted by greater gender equity, reflected in measures of wives' empowerment. We used an extremely large, nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey dataset from India (2019-2020), narrowed to only households in which spouses co-reside with off-plot water sources (N = 10 616), and applying a multinomial regression approach. In >20% of households, men are the primary fetchers. They are more likely to have primary responsibility when water is more distant, privately purchased, or transported by vehicle. Contrary to predictions, men assume greater responsibility for household water fetching as their wives' empowerment measures decrease and when they want to control their movement. Married men in India sometimes assume responsibility for water fetching, but this is not explained by greater household gender equity. The findings also suggest that when men are responsible for fetching they have heightened risk of some forms of physical trauma but less relative psychological harm. Detailing why men fetch water matters for identifying and mitigating the physical and emotion harms of bearing responsibility for water labor, with implications for how gender should be conceptualized in water interventions intending to improve health and well-being.
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e23990Informations de copyright
© 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.
Références
Achore, M., Bisung, E., & Kuusaana, E. D. (2020). Coping with water insecurity at the household level: A synthesis of qualitative evidence. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, 230, 113598.
Asaba, R. B., Fagan, H., Kabonesa, C., & Mugumya, F. (2013). Beyond distance and time: Gender and the burden of water collection in rural Uganda. WH2O. The Journal of Gender and Water, 2, 31-38.
Bagaya, A. (2010). Multinomial logistic regression; usage and application in risk analysis. Journal of Applied Quantitative Methods, 5(2), 288-297.
Bhasin, V. (2007). Status of tribal women in India. Studies on Home and Community Science, 1(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09737189.2007.11885234
Bisung, E., & Elliott, S. J. (2017). Psychosocial impacts of the lack of access to water and sanitation in low-and middle-income countries: A scoping review. Journal of Water and Health, 15(1), 17-30.
Brewis, A., Choudhary, N., & Wutich, A. (2019). Low water access as a gendered physiological stressor: Blood pressure evidence from Nepal. American Journal of Human Biology, 31(3), e23234.
Brewis, A., Dubois, L. Z., Wutich, A., Adams, E. A., Dickin, S., Elliott, S. J., Epinotti, V. L. H. V., Ilboudo Nébié, E., & Korzenevica, M. (2023). Gender identities, water insecurity, and risk: Re-theorizing the connections for a gender-inclusive toolkit for water insecurity research. WIREs Water, 30. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1685
Brewis, A. A., Piperata, B., Thompson, A. L., & Wutich, A. (2020). Localizing resource insecurities: A biocultural perspective on water and wellbeing. WIREs Water, 7(4), e1440.
Carrard, N., Crawford, J., Halcrow, G., & Willetts, J. (2013). A framework for exploring gender equality outcomes from WASH programmes. Waterlines, 32(4), 315-333.
Cavill, S., Huggett, C., & Mott, J. (2022). Engaging men and boys for gender-transformative WASH. Frontiers of Sanitation, 20. https://doi.org/10.19088/SLH.2022.004
Choudhary, N., Brewis, A., Wutich, A., & Udas, P. B. (2020). Sub-optimal household water access is associated with greater risk of intimate partner violence against women: Evidence from Nepal. Journal of Water and Health, 18(4), 579-594.
Cooper-Vince, C. E., Arachy, H., Kakuhikire, B., Vořechovská, D., Mushavi, R. C., Baguma, C., McDonough, A. Q., Bangsberg, D. R., & Tsai, A. C. (2018). Water insecurity and gendered risk for depression in rural Uganda: A hotspot analysis. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 1143. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6043-z
Das, D., & Safini, H. (2018). Water insecurity in urban India: Looking through a gendered lens on everyday urban living. Environment and Urbanization ASIA, 9(2), 178-197.
Epstein, A., Bendavid, E., Nash, D., Charlebois, E. D., & Weiser, S. D. (2020). Drought and intimate partner violence towards women in 19 countries in sub-Saharan Africa during 2011-2018: A population-based study. PLoS Medicine, 17(3), e1003064. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003064
Evans, J., Sahgal, N., Salazar, A. M., Starr, K. J., & Corichi, M. (2022). How Indians view gender roles in families and society. Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project, March 2.
Geere, J. A., Bartram, J., Bates, L., Danquah, L., Evans, B., Fisher, M. B., Groce, N., Majuru, B., Mokoena, M., & Mukhola, M. (2018). Carrying water may be a major contributor to disability from musculoskeletal disorders in low-income countries: A cross-sectional survey in South Africa, Ghana and Vietnam. Journal of Global Health, 8(1), 010406.
Geere, J. A., & Cortobius, M. (2017). Who carries the weight of water? Fetching water in rural and urban areas and the implications for water security. Water Alternatives, 10(2), 513-540.
Grant, M., Cavill, S., Francis, N., Leahy, C., Huggett, C., Leong, L., Mercer, E., Myers, J., & Rankin, T. (2020). A call to action: Organizational, professional, and personal change for gender transformative WASH programming. Waterlines, 39(2), 219-237.
Harris, L., Kleiber, D., Goldin, J., Darkwah, A., & Morinville, C. (2017). Intersections of gender and water: Comparative approaches to everyday gendered negotiations of water access in underserved areas of Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa. Journal of Gender Studies, 26, 561-582.
Hawkins, R., & Seager, J. (2010). Gender and water in Mongolia. The Professional Geographer, 62(1), 16-31.
MacArthur, J., Carrard, N., & Willetts, J. (2020). WASH and gender: A critical review of the literature and implications for gender-transformative WASH research. Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development, 10(4), 818-827.
Mason, L. R. (2012). Gender and asset dimensions of seasonal water insecurity in urban Philippines. Weather, Climate, and Society, 4(1), 20-33.
Matlak, M. (2014). The crisis of masculinity in the economic crisis context. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 140, 367-370.
Nounkeu, C. D., & Dharod, J. M. (2022). Water fetching burden: A qualitative study to examine how it differs by gender among rural households in the west region of Cameroon. Health Care for Women International, 43(9), 1023-1041.
Osella, F., & Osella, C. (2000). Migration, money, and masculinity in Kerala. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(1), 117-133.
Rosinger, A. Y., Bethancourt, H. J., Young, S. L., & Schultz, A. F. (2021). The embodiment of water insecurity: Injuries and chronic stress in lowland Bolivia. Social Science & Medicine, 291, 114490.
Sainani, K. L. (2021). Multinomial and ordinal logistic regression. PM&R, 13(9), 1050-1055. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmrj.12622
Singh, N. (2006). The changing role of women in water management: Myths and realities. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies, 3, 94-113.
Sorenson, S. B., Morssink, C., & Campos, P. A. (2011). Safe access to safe water in low income countries: Water fetching in current times. Social Science & Medicine, 72(9), 1522-1526.
Sultana, F. (2012). Water, culture, and gender: An analysis from Bangladesh. In B. R. Johnston, L. Hiwasaki, I. J. Klaver, A. R. Castillo, & V. Strang (Eds.), Water, cultural diversity, and global environmental change: Emerging trends, sustainable futures? (pp. 237-252). Springer.
Sultana, F. (2021). Political ecology 1: From margins to center. Progress in Human Geography, 45(1), 156-165.
Tabachnick, B. G., Fidell, L. S., & Osterlind, S. J. (2001). Using multivariate statistics. Allyn and Bacon.
Tallman, P. S., Collins, S., Salmon-Mulanovich, G., Rusyidi, B., Kothadia, A., & Cole, S. (2022). Water insecurity and gender-based violence: A global review of the evidence. WIREs Water, 10(1), e1619.
Tomaz, P., Jepson, W., & Santos, J. D. O. (2020). Urban household water insecurity from the margins: Perspectives from Northeast Brazil. The Professional Geographer, 72(4), 481-498.
van Anders, S. M. (2015). Beyond sexual orientation: Integrating gender/sex and diverse sexualities via sexual configurations theory. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44(5), 1177-1213.
Venkataramanan, V., Geere, J. A. L., Thomae, B., Stoler, J., Hunter, P. R., & Young, S. L. (2020). In pursuit of ‘safe’ water: The burden of personal injury from water fetching in 21 low-income and middle-income countries. BMJ Global Health, 5(10), e003328.
Vij, S. (2014). Urbanization, common property resources and gender relations in a peri-urban context. Vision, 18(4), 339-347.
Wutich, A. (2009). Intrahousehold disparities in women and men's experiences of water insecurity and emotional distress in urban Bolivia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 23(4), 436-454.
Wutich, A. (2020). Water insecurity: An agenda for research and call to action for human biology. American Journal of Human Biology, 32(1), e23345.
Wutich, A., Brewis, A., & Tsai, A. (2020). Water and mental health. WIREs Water, 7(5), e1461.
Xaxa, V. (2004). Women and gender in the study of tribes in India. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 11(3), 345-367.