With International Women’s Day tomorrow, we thought we’d look at the impact of air pollution on women. In researching this, we were surprised how little we had read or heard about this topic, despite looking into air pollution in depth for over a year.
There are two main ways to think about this: whether women’s bodies are different physiologically so that air pollution impacts them in different ways; or whether women typically do different things making their exposure to air pollution different to men’s. There are also the indirect effects that air pollution has, which might disproportionately affect women’s lives.
Body negative
On the physiological point, we were surprised to read that diesel fumes do indeed affect women more. This may be connected to higher incidences of asthma in women that do not respond well to treatment. We also found that women are more likely to develop Alzheimers, for which we know air pollution is a risk factor. A major contributor is that women live longer; however, we were surprised that researchers appear not to have looked at whether the remainder of the explanation lies in women’s exposure and reactions to air pollution.
Clearly one major physiological difference for women is the potential for pregnancy and childbirth. This British Medical Journal article demonstrated air pollution’s impact on high blood pressure and gestational diabetes during pregnancy, and risk of heart attacks during labour. Further, the risks to the unborn child (including stillbirth, low birth weight and premature birth) are well documented, including from this Royal College. There is also growing evidence about the impact on fertility, affecting men and women in different ways.
School run peril
Coming onto difference in lifestyles: one common difference is doing the school run. Women do this more than men (though getting authoritative data on how much more is challenging). This puts them at greater risk of exposure (and we know how the traffic fumes spike at those times and places). We also know that women cycle less (about half as many cycle regularly as men according to Sustrans). We don’t know what that is replaced with, but we do know that being on a bike is better for you than being in enclosed transport.
However, looking globally, the biggest difference in lifestyle that links to air pollution risk comes from a very different source: spending more time indoors and, in particular, cooking. This can lead to exposure to very high levels of particulate matter, amongst other things. This article also pointed out that the reduction in lung function from exposure to pollution from cooking can also make women more vulnerable to transport emissions while outside.
Then we come onto the indirect effects. This interesting piece by the Stockholm Environment Institute pointed to the unequal burden on women when schools are closed due to high pollution episodes. We would add to this the care for children with respiratory conditions, which is likely to be disproportionately borne by female carers.
Female founders
Back to less life-threatening problems: Louise has entered the world of founders of air quality companies. She’s had huge support from others in the air pollution world, but is aware that almost all of these have been men (with the honourable exceptions of Christa Hasenkopf who founded openAQ and Christina Last who founded AQAI).
A nice microcosm of the air quality start up world came through the Breathable Cities accelerator which we covered previously. This had ten companies, of which seven were all male founding teams; women were on the founding teams of the other three but we don’t think there were any all-women teams. Possibly a good job: one statistic you hear regularly is that merely 2% of all venture capital money goes to women founding teams.
This has got us thinking: if there were more women leading companies addressing air pollution and getting more investment, would the disproportionate effect on women around the world get greater attention?