Written by Dr Joanna P Faure Walker, UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction.

Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, following the 2011 earthquake
(courtesy of Tex Texin on Flickr)

On Friday 8 March 2013, the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction hosted an open panel discussion on ‘Gender and Disasters’.

The panel was chaired by Dr Ellie Lee (Reader in Social Policy and expert in gender issues from the University of Kent), and comprised: Paula Albrito (Head of the Regional Office for Europe for the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction), David Alexander (Professor in Risk and Disaster Reduction, IRDR UCL), and Linda O’Halloran (Director of NGO Thinking Development).

The three panellists provided examples of various natural disasters in which women showed a greater risk to the event than men either through active discrimination or through pre-existing factors.

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Last weekend, UCL Gender Studies hosted Gender Online, an interdisciplinary post-graduate symposium which aimed to open a conversation about the relationship between gender, digital communications and the internet.

The event, funded by the Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies, brought academics, graduate students and members of the public together from many different backgrounds to create cutting-edge debate around a diverse selection of papers.

It had been widely promoted by the use of social networking sites such as Twitter and was recorded for podcasting at a later date. Speakers came from UCL Gender, and Digital Anthropology, the Institute of Education (IoE) Social and Educational Research, LSE Social Anthropology and NYU Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Programme.

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