Since the 1980s, there has been a growing interest in gender issues within sustainability research. Studies of gender and sustainability have taken two primary dimensions: differential ways in which men and women contribute to sustainability, and different ways in which environmental changes affect men and women. Most of those studies have focused on either climate change or natural resource management, such as forest conservation, water management, and land rights. However, within the fields of industrial ecology and community sustainability, gender is still an unexplored area.
Growing research interest and funding on sustainable development of green buildings, emerging technologies, “circular economy,” and resilient infrastructures is an important trajectory in building sustainable future, but do current researchers and experts comprehensively account for gender? Are current research projects and government policies for sustainable technology gender inclusive? Do the projects for building resilient infrastructures and fostering sustainable communities equally benefit men and women? Moreover, how exactly do researchers approach gender: do they perpetuate generalizations about what women are and men are, do they treat men and women as homogeneous categories or acknowledge their intersectional differences related to class, age, and ability?
In pursuit of these questions, this paper looks at the place of gender in building sustainable and resilient communities. It draws on two methods: 1) a bibliometric analysis of the literature and 2) a survey among leading experts in the field of industrial sustainability in the U.S. A bibliometric analysis of research articles from 2000-to-present is performed to identify the scope and proportion of gender-related topics in the industrial sustainability literature. It is also used to quantify the relative strength of connections between various gender research domains via analyzing the occurrence and co-occurrence frequency of author supplied and indexed keywords. The bibliometric analysis is then used to formulate the questions and key concepts of the survey. The survey is distributed online, and the results are analyzed through the SPSS.
Based on the findings, this work discusses research opportunities and challenges in the design of sustainable infrastructures and communities that are gender inclusive. It charts future research trajectories, outlining how the designing of transportation systems, buildings, and urban landscapes can incorporate concerns with gender equity. This paper also offers policy recommendations that target both men and women in terms of their rights to infrastructure and benefits from improvements in technologies.
• Human behavior and rebound , • Public policy and governance , • Sustainable urban systems
