- Report: Katrina and the Women of New Orleans
- A collaborative effort of the Gender and Disasters Research Group at NCCROW
- Posted February 3, 2009
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Katrina and the Women of New Orleans is a collaborative effort of the Gender and Disasters Research Group sponsored by the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women. The goal in writing this report was to analyze the ways the hurricanes of 2005 affected the lives of women and girls and to bring those findings to the attention of policy makers, community leaders, scholars, grant makers, and disaster managers.
The ten chapters of the report focus on the pre-storm vulnerability and post-storm resilience of New Orleans women, and tackle the dearth of qualitative data specific to women to report on housing, employment and earnings, women’s physical and mental health, and domestic violence.
The report is available for download and redistribution as a single PDF, and as PDFs of individual chapters.
Some rights reserved. Please contact nccrow@tulane.edu or phone 504 865 5238 for permissions.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT =>
KATRINA AND THE WOMEN OF NEW ORLEANS
(Executive Report and Summary of Findings/PDF/76 pages/1.7 MB)
also
KATRINA AND THE WOMEN OF NEW ORLEANS
(Chapter downloads/PDF)
Preface
Chapter I. Gender and Disasters: Theoretical Considerations
Shirley Laska, Betty Hearn Morrow, Beth Willinger and Nancy Mock
Chapter II. Queer Katrina: Gender and Sexual Orientation Matters in the Aftermath of the Disaster
Charlotte D’Ooge
Chapter III. Demographic and Socioeconomic Change in Relation to Gender and Katrina
Beth Willinger with Jessica Gerson
Chapter IV. The Effects of Katrina on the Employment and Earnings of New Orleans Women
Beth Willinger
Chapter V. A Status Report on Housing in New Orleans After Katrina: An Intersectional Analysis
Rachel E. Luft with Shana Griffin
Chapter VI. Health and Health Care
Nancy Mock
Chapter VII. Mental Health Status of Women and Children Following Hurricane Katrina
Stacy Overstreet and Berre Burch
Chapter VIII. Domestic Violence and Disaster
Pamela Jenkins and Brenda Phillips
Chapter IX. Sexual Health of Young Women
Meghan Greeley and Planned Parenthood of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta
Chapter X. The Power to Influence
Beth Willinger
Contributors
We encourage you to share this work with colleagues, students, policymakers, friends, and family.
We welcome feedback. Please comment below, or contact report editor Beth Willinger (willing@tulane.edu or 504 865 5238).
A complex picture and simple message emerges from our findings: If New Orleans is to successfully rebuild its status as a great American city, it must focus on the welfare of women. Women are the majority of the New Orleans population. Women raise children, tend to the ill and aged, manage households, and comprise 50 percent of the New Orleans labor force working in sales, service, management and professional occupations. Women are essential to the home and in the workforce. Three-fourths of mothers with children work outside the home. Not surprising, women have been more likely than men to suffer post-traumatic stress and other anxiety disorders following Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, huge discrepancies exist in the distribution of rewards, a fact made worse by the storm. Women earn just 71 percent of the wages paid to men, 10 percent less than pre-Katrina. More than one-third of families are headed by a women, but a great many of these are in poverty. Women’s lower wages mean more women are in need of low-income housing, affordable childcare, and free healthcare -- resources made particularly scarce by the storm. "Woman" is not a coherent or homogeneous grouping and Hurricane Katrina served to perpetuate differences among women. Black women earn just 61 percent of the wages paid to White women. While 55 percent of White women hold a Bachelor's degree or higher, only 14 percent of Black women do, an unacceptable reality in a city that boasts seven four year colleges and universities and several technical colleges. Sadly, what remained unchanged by Hurricane Katrina were long standing traditions regarding the roles of women and men, and the historical divisions among women based on race and class.
Contributors to Katrina and the Women of New Orleans: Berre Burch and Stacy Overstreet, Department of Psychology at Tulane University; Meghan Greeley and Planned Parenthood of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta; Pam Jenkins, Department of Sociology at the University of New Orleans, and Betty Phillips, Fire and Emergency Management Program at Oklahoma State University; Shirley Laska, the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology and the Department of Sociology at the University of New Orleans, and Betty Hearn Morrow, Department of Sociology at Florida International University, emerita; Rachel E. Luft, Department of Sociology at the University of New Orleans, with Shana Griffin of INCITE! Women of Color against Violence; and Charlotte D’Ooge, Nancy Mock, and Beth Willinger of the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University.
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