Sexing the climate

Are men and women different when it comes to global warming? Simon Fanshawe pays manly tribute to sensitivity – and shopping.

There is an airport book cliché of the ‘men/Mars/women/Venus’ type that divides every area of human activity – friendship, love, work, play, or tackling climate change – into the different attitudes and behaviours of male and female. Roughly speaking, men come out of this as insensitive, unemotional twits who like machines and big theories, whereas women are emotionally sensitive and focus on human interaction and behaviour.

Women spend their entire lives multitasking, while men can’t operate the TV remote and drink a glass of wine at the same time. Clearly there are exceptions to all of this, but they’re probably either gay or nuns.

This falls into that rather brilliant category of pop theorising that is wrong – but in the right way. There’s just enough of a sniff of truth to it that you buy the book at the airport. At the end of the flight, the men and women on board have burned the same amount of carbon – but you’re still wondering whether they have different attitudes to climate change, and more important, how to tackle it.

What women want

The first thing to say of course is that, whether man or woman, we are all hypocrites in this area. The Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) tells us that “a clear majority of people in the UK are concerned about climate change”, and yet, simultaneously, are actually doing very little about it. Most of our cavity walls remain uninsulated. A measly 0.4% of households generate any form of renewable energy, and only 0.3% of cars sold in 2005 were low-carbon models.

We happily drive to the organic farm shop and the bottle bank, fly abroad to take holidays in carbon neutral hotels and think that eating tofu once a week significantly reduces the amount of methane released into the atmosphere by cows (and us).

Simon Retallack, who wrote the ippr report, says that they didn’t research gender difference. His hunch is that “it’s a red herring”. But not everyone agrees. The Women’s Institute reckons women are a “powerful resource to be mobilised to act against climate change”. In May, its National Federation, together with the Women’s Environmental Network, launched The Women’s Manifesto on Climate Change [see box, above]. At the head of a litany of statistics, they found that 80% of females are very concerned about climate change, compared with only 64% of males – and that women are overwhelmingly in favour of a series of actions to tackle it. The real killer numbers, however, illustrate the extent to which women control domestic purchasing decisions. They make 93% of decisions about household food, 84% about clothing, 82% about household products, 75% about holidays and even 61% about cars (which I definitely thought was the province of us males).

Man stuff

You’d imagine that this, coupled with their levels of concern, would unleash a tide of climate-friendly shopping down the aisles. But sadly, if “shopping is the new politics” as The Economist put it recently, there’s not much of the ethical kind going on. The Co-operative Bank and New Economics Foundation Ethical Purchasing Index shows that ethical consumers still command only a 1.6% share of the marketplace.

It sounds like a drop in the ocean – about as effective as switching the light off while you have sex. But while ethical shopping may be at a very low base, it is rising very fast. Which is encouraging, because shopping is so central to people’s lives that it acts as a big metaphor and stimulus for change. The trend is producing not just the laudable and worthy, but some fun websites too. Take the wonderfully named www.ethicsgirls. “Set the example,” says their strapline.“If you love to shop and care about the future of our planet then Ethics Girls is the place for you.” Show how much you care by buying sustainable trainers, suntan lotion, jeans, even a ‘mobile phone & iPod solar charger’.

As Sam Roger, the jolly founder of the site, says: “Women like shopping and we’re good at it. Tackling climate change is always couched in very technical terms, and you’re supposed to do loads of research. Women take a different approach, we are busy, we don’t spend hours sitting at our computers doing research.”

“The greatest accomplishment of the environmental movement is a revolution in awareness and understanding.”
Janet Welsh Brown of the World Resources Institute – cited in Grist Magazine, 31 July 2007

The Ethics Girls approach is accessible and straightforward – it has a whole section simply called ‘No Nasties’. This isn’t the sort of technical term favoured by scientists, who (obviously) are also mainly chaps – the kind who write those unintelligible users’ manuals. Sam Roger would probably favour labelling on 4x4s that says “Drive this and the polar bear dies”. Although I didn’t actually ask her.

Women may be more able to understand the change required as an organic one, and not just in terms of a huge strategic approach, says Ruth Davis, who heads the climate change policy team at the RSPB, but spoke to me in her personal capacity. They are more prepared to start the process with small decisions in their personal lives. They recognise that change can be critically energised by such a series of tiny personal commitments, and not just by Treaties and Protocols.

Yet it’s the ‘male’ approach that dominates in government – partly because government is dominated by men. As Davis says, “government works in a way that favours the big infrastructure solution. There’s always a technical answer – a dam, or carbon capture and storage. They think ‘once we’ve fixed the problem we can just carry on, progress as usual’.”

“Green isn’t some ‘wussy’ tree-hugging thing. Green is patriotic. Green is strategic. Green is the new red, white, and blue.”
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times columnist and advocate of a muscular ‘geo-green’ approach to US global policy – cited in Grist Magazine, 31 July 2007

All the UK’s best-known eco campaigns are dominated by men, too, from the well worn faces of Jonathon Porritt or Peter Melchett through Stompy to the pretty newcomer, 21-year-old Joss Garman of Plane Stupid. And Mr Hair Shirt himself, George Monbiot, has recently derided ethical shopping as “just another way of showing how rich you are”.

But if consumption is at the root of the problem, and women are at the forefront of shopping, does that mean they are actually the anti-activists – the ones who do most damage to the environment in the long run?

"To ask a middle class woman to stop buying clothes is like choking off her air"

When I spoke to Robert Llewellyn, the actor and long time commentator on the male/female dynamic, he made the sharp point that “to ask a middle class woman to stop buying clothes is like choking off her air. All the women I know buy far more than they can ever possibly wear. So, yes, they might take the empty plastic cartons to the re-cycling bin, but only after they’ve bought a massive amount of shoes, handbags and clothes they really don’t need.” But then he added, “I would also happily admit that if cars cost the same as a new pair of shoes, men would have piles of them.” (Intriguingly, 70% of the buyers of Worn Again shoes, made out of recycled material are men – although this may have more to do with the relatively chunky designs than a female obsession with new-at-all-cost.)

Well, Monbiot may have a point about the inadequacy of ineffectual gestures – but I say boo to his scorn for even the smallest of efforts. We have to start somewhere, and at least so-called ethical shopping is a way of setting an example.

Since women control most of the shopping decisions, the WI is probably on to something. Although we will probably have to define ourselves less by what we buy, and more by how we behave, to make a real change. And my guess is that most of us, men and women, are still really secretly thinking ‘it won’t affect me, so bring on the hot weather and the sun tans and forget the grandchildren’. I could be wrong; I’m only a man. But when we do decide to make that change, it’ll be women driving the domestic agenda and men thinking they are doing the real work with dams and treaties. So, women and children first. As ever, we men will follow – once we’ve spent hours surfing the net to research the options.

Simon Fanshawe is a broadcaster, writer, award-winning comedian and champion of gay rights.

20 September 2007

Simon Fanshawe

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