Violent conflict has lasting impacts on human capital, and these impacts are seldom gender neutral. Death and destruction alter the structure and dynamics of households, including their demographic profiles and traditional gender roles. Attention to the gender impacts of conflict has tended to focus on sexual and gender-based violence. The authors suggest that a wider set of gender issues be considered. The impacts of conflict are diverse, and can either increase or decrease pre-existing gender inequalities. Gender inequalities shape and are shaped by the responses of individuals and households to violent conflict.
This paper organises the emerging empirical evidence using a framework that identifies both the differential impacts of violent conflict on males and females (first-round impacts) and the role of gender inequality in framing adaptive responses to conflict (second-round impacts). The evidence presented is limited by the inability of most research to observe and measure the household processes and dynamics that mediate the impacts of violent conflict on individuals and families.
War’s mortality burden is disproportionately borne by males, whereas women and children constitute a majority of refugees and the displaced. Indirect war impacts on health are more equally distributed between the genders. Conflicts create households headed by widows who can be especially vulnerable to intergenerational poverty.
Second-round impacts can provide opportunities for women in work and politics triggered by the absence of men. Households adapt to conflict with changes in marriage and fertility, migration, investments in children’s health and schooling, and the distribution of labour between the genders.
The literature review reveals the following:
- The heterogeneity of impacts across contexts, conflicts, and countries for girls and boys, women and men. In Cambodia and Colombia, boys’ schooling suffered more from conflict than did girls’ schooling. In rural Guatemala, however, girls’ schooling was more affected. In Burundi, conflict seems to have especially affected the health of boys, whereas some evidence suggests that girls’ health was more affected than boys’ health in Iraq.
- Regularities in the effects of conflict on the labour market by gender for countries and households that mirror those observed in response to economic shocks. In some settings, women cope with the loss of men’s income by joining paid employment, whereas in wealthier agricultural households in Colombia, conflict leads men to increase their participation in off-farm paid work.
- Conflict changes households’ demographic profiles, and families’ coping responses include adjustments in marriage and fertility behaviour.
- The responses of many households show resilience and adaptability and underline women’s contributions through alterations to their traditional labour allocation and roles in the family. This evidence suggests that unseen benefits of the costs and destruction of violent conflict may be changes in traditional gender roles and greater gender equality in the household.
- Women left alone to provide for their families may be particularly vulnerable to poverty that can persist across generations. Targeting widows and their families with post-conflict assistance and resources might halt the reproduction of conflict-related poverty.
- The empirical evidence counters commonly-held views, such as that sexual and gender-based violence is a phenomenon that affects only girls and women, that rape is a weapon of war rather than a crime of opportunity, or that girls and women are always worse off as result of conflict.
