Sustainability
Bethany Climpson
19
‘Kate Bushing’
I stand outside my workplace and think about how sustainability has become my world. I think about a man who once asked me whether I felt guilty for taking up so much space at the University, doing so many roles and never letting anyone else have a chance. As if my success, something I’ve worked towards my whole life, could only exist because of someone else’s shortcomings, as if I am ‘too good’ to do ‘so much’, I need to allow others to have a chance.
The comment made me want to cry. I replayed everything I should have done in an interview to make space for an unnamed other, to allow them to get the role, to submit to my opposition. And although he never said it, I imagined that other as a man. I grieved the opportunities I had supposedly taken from men, rather than the many quietly taken from me. This is how a woman’s world works: caring for your opposition, who is so quick to tear you down.
This is often how sustainability is framed: a personal responsibility, unevenly shared. We’re told it’s pointless to care about something that we didn’t cause, but I’ve had this ‘pointless’ endeavour pressed into me relentlessly. Maybe caring about the environment has been marketed, gendered and exhausted. Maybe protecting the Earth has been made into women’s work.
Caring is a Group Effort
If caring for the environment has been made into women’s work, how are we paid? In guilt or inspiration? Well, a study of female employees in Metro Manila, the capital region of the Philippines, offers an answer. The study defines ‘eco-caring’, as concern for the environment and active involvement in ecological action, which was reported to lower workplace stress, burnout and absences, and lead to greater job satisfaction. Those with stronger connections to nature also experienced lower anxiety and psychological distress. In this context, care allows female identifying people to feel in control.
When eco-care is supported by those around us and grounded in agency rather than guilt, it can foster fulfilment instead of anxiety. These findings do not suggest that women should quietly absorb yet another responsibility, nor that environmental action is feminine by nature. Rather, they highlight the power of collective action. Eco-care works best as a shared practice, not as individualised responsibility, which can breed climate anxiety and worries of never doing enough. Guilt-based frameworks demand constant self-surveillance and sacrifice, stripping care of its potential to be sustaining. The problem then, is not that women care too much, but that care is extracted, individualised and unsupported.
Ethics as Labour
In the UK, the eco-gender gap shows up clearly in everyday practices. According to Mintel Research, 71% of women say that they actively try to live more ethically, compared to 59% of men – with women more likely to turn down the heating when they’re not home, conserve water and compost food waste.
These patterns didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. Women still carry most of the domestic labour, even when they work full-time. This means sustainability practices can become folded into an already heavy bundle of responsibilities, rather than shared across the family.
At the same time, confusion about what can be recycled points to systemic failure rather than individual negligence. Nearly half of those surveyed admitted they didn’t know how to recycle properly, and some did not have the space to adequately do so. Sustainability is often seen as a personal moral test, rather than an infrastructural responsibility that requires clear systems, shared labour and collective support.
Masculinity and Marketing
When sustainability is framed as women’s work, not clocking in is a way of performing masculinity. A research paper in 2016, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that men may be motivated to avoid or oppose green behaviours to safeguard their gender identity. This includes avoiding carrying reusable bags, recycling or adopting plant-based diets, as these behaviours are perceived as feminine. Rather than an explicit lack of eco-care, these actions can serve to maintain cultural expectations of strength and independence.
This is also reinforced by marketing. Most eco-friendly products, from cleaning brands to household items, are aimed at women, embedding environmental responsibility into caregiving stereotypes, subtly reinforcing the idea of sustainability as a woman’s domain.
This gendered framing is noted by Mintel’s Senior Consumer Lifestyles Analyst, Jack Duckett, as an opportunity to reposition sustainability as a part of modern masculinity. In a world where women are empowered to stand up to sexist behaviours, or allowing men to get away with not knowing or not caring, framing environmentalism as sexy is a good place to start, but a bad place to end – a bit like anthropocentrism (which you can read about here). It’s not a woman’s role to educate or inspire a man, but there is hope that through framing eco-care as a desirable trait, performative actions will strike real care. I see you, mullet man reading The Bell Jar on the train.
Gender and Generational Burdens
I’m sure you now understand how unevenly experienced climate anxiety is; the younger generations feel it too – reporting the highest levels of worry. Women are more likely to experience the material impacts of climate change, including extreme weather and poverty. The generational dimension is visible in the UK and beyond, where Gen Z and Millennials are reporting rising climate guilt compared with older cohorts. These emotions prompt discussion and community seeking, rather than immediate action, reflecting a desire to share responsibility. Climate anxiety is a completely rational response, highlighting the need for structural solutions that support collective action, rather than leaving environmental responsibility to individuals.
Please Mind the Gap
The eco-gender gap is a symptom of gender inequality. Although our small individual actions matter, expecting women to carry the weight of sustainability reproduces the same inequities they already face. Closing the gap between how people care about the environment requires gender-neutral and collective systems that don’t solely rely on consumption-based metrics. Shared responsibility through open dialogues, especially with masculine people are essential. The planet is everyone’s home, and therefore everyone’s responsibility: it is not only a woman’s world, so it should not be only a woman’s work.
By Felicity Lindo, SGO Projects Officer
Sources
‘The eco gender gap why is saving the planet seen as women’s work’ by Elle Hunt.
‘Why do Women Experience More Eco-Anxiety Than Men?’ by Jasmine Wallis.
‘Gender and Waste Management’ by the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme.
‘How big is the generational divide on climate change? By Hannah Ritchie.
