Gender, Intersectionality, and Development: Violence, Climate Change, and the Limits of Nonintersectional Analysis

Traditional development models often rely on a binary "men vs. women" lens, yet this simplicity can be dangerous. In crisis zones like Ukraine or on the frontlines of climate change, a one-size-fits-all approach risks leaving the most vulnerable behind. This paper explores why intersectionality is n

Development research and practice have long relied on simplified categorical frameworks, most notably the binary distinction between 'men' and 'women', to understand and address inequality. Since the 1970s, when gender was formally recognised by development institutions, these two categories have structured much of the analysis undertaken by aid agencies and policymakers (Harcourt, 2016). Yet this binary thinking conceals as much as it reveals. It flattens the diversity of experience within each group and obscures the ways in which overlapping social identities (such as race, class, disability, sexuality, age, migration status, and religion) interact to shape individual vulnerability and access to resources.

This essay argues that an intersectional lens is not merely a theoretical refinement but a practical necessity for effective development work. Drawing on two interconnected case studies, violence against women in conflict-affected Ukraine and gendered experiences of climate change and environmental insecurity, it demonstrates how nonintersectional analyses fall short of capturing the full complexity of inequality, and how intersectional approaches offer more targeted, equitable, and ultimately more effective development strategies.

The concept of intersectionality was introduced by American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race and gender interact (Harcourt, 2016, p. 398; Pearse, 2016), and has since been applied globally across a range of fields. As UN Women (2022a) affirms, overlapping social identities must be recognised and integrated into development policies and practices. Without this, programmes risk inadvertently reinforcing the very inequalities they seek to address.

Part I: Violence Against Women in Ukraine

Context

Ukraine is currently one of the main hubs for human trafficking in Europe. Women, and especially displaced women, are overrepresented as victims, primarily subjected to sexual exploitation. The ongoing war has significantly exacerbated these pre-existing issues (NCGM, 2022). As the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations notes, female-headed households, internally displaced persons (IDPs), Roma people, LGBTQIA+ persons, the elderly, and people with disabilities are all more severely affected by the consequences of the conflict due to pre-existing structural inequalities (NCGM, 2022). With the war unlikely to end in the near future, rapid and effective aid must remain a priority.

The Limitations of a Nonintersectional Lens

A nonintersectional approach examines women as a single, undifferentiated social category, assuming they face similar risks and forms of violence within a given conflict. While this may yield useful broad-level findings, it has significant limitations when it comes to understanding which women are most vulnerable and why.

Consider the following: since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, gender-based violence (GBV) in Ukraine has increased by 36% (UN Women, 2025). Women have reported heightened insecurity and elevated risks of sexual violence, leading many to avoid going out after dark, even for urgent needs, due to fears of assault, harassment, or rape, often perpetrated by men under the influence of alcohol or drugs (UNFPA, 2024).

While this perspective documents the fear and vulnerability women face, it tells us nothing specific about which women are most at risk, or how different groups experience these violations differently. It does not distinguish, for instance, between women still living in active conflict zones and those who have been displaced; it does not account for age differences or urban–rural disparities; and it provides no basis for designing targeted interventions. Without such granularity, viable and effective aid programmes are nearly impossible to develop.

This simplified framing is not only analytically insufficient; it is also a legacy of the binary categories that were institutionalised in development thinking decades ago. As Harcourt (2016) notes, the recognition of 'women' as a development category in the 1970s solidified a two-category model that continues to constrain research and policy design to this day. Treating women as a homogeneous group may obscure disproportionate rates of violence against specific sub-groups, including young women, elderly women, women of colour, and LGBTQIA+ individuals who may face particular vulnerability to gender-based violence (Janet Henshall Momsen, 2020).

What an Intersectional Lens Reveals

An intersectional lens moves beyond binary categories to consider how overlapping social identities interact, and how this produces differentiated experiences of privilege, barriers, and risk (UN Women, 2022a). In the context of violence against women in Ukraine, this approach reveals specific vulnerabilities that a nonintersectional analysis would entirely miss. Several illustrative examples follow.

Women living with HIV represent one such group. Research from Ukraine shows that these women experience significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD compared to HIV-negative women (Positive Women, 2024). This demonstrates how health status intersects with gender and conflict to compound psychological vulnerability, an insight with direct implications for trauma-informed aid programming.

Roma women offer a further example of how ethnicity and gender intersect to produce distinct forms of exclusion. Reports indicate that Roma women in Ukraine were routinely denied access to mainstream shelters, forcing them to rely on Roma community networks for safety (UN Women, 2022b). A shelter system designed without awareness of ethnic discrimination is not merely imperfect; it is structurally exclusionary.

Disability provides a third axis of differentiation. Machlouzarides and Uretici (2023) found that only 13% of women with disabilities felt very safe from violence, compared to 20% of women without disabilities, a significant gap pointing to the need for targeted support tailored to specific types of disability, as well as further research in this area. Moreover, women with disabilities may face practical barriers to accessing aid that are entirely invisible to programmes not designed with their needs in mind.

Finally, displacement status shapes women's experiences in important ways. IDPs face significant barriers to healthcare access, and this is especially pronounced among LGBTQIA+ individuals. As NCGM (2022) reports, transgender persons, for instance, are often unable to access hormone therapy, a form of medically necessary care that generic women's health programmes are unlikely to address.

As there are varying and often intersecting forms of discrimination that reinforce conditions of inequality in conflict settings (Popov and Poiedynok, 2024), the intersectional lens is not merely useful but essential to ensuring that no one is left behind.

Part II: Climate Change, Environmental Insecurity, and Gender

Climate Change as a Threat Multiplier

Climate change is widely described as a 'threat multiplier' because it amplifies pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities, particularly in fragile contexts (Pompili, 2024). A gender perspective on climate and environmental insecurity is essential precisely because the impacts are not distributed equally. According to Anjum and Aziz (2025), capturing women's specific vulnerabilities is a prerequisite for designing effective climate policies.

Critically, however, Pearse (2016) cautions against naturalising women's vulnerability. The heightened risks that women face are not the product of any innate characteristic; they originate from structural social and economic inequalities such as poverty, limited education, lack of income, restricted property rights, and exclusion from decision-making. Women account for the majority of the world's poor and are more reliant on natural resources for their livelihood than men (United Nations, 2022), which means that climate shocks disproportionately threaten their survival and wellbeing. The danger, then, is not inherent to women's nature, but to the conditions of inequality in which they live.

These structural inequalities are intensified by climate change across multiple dimensions. Research confirms that climate change tends to fuel violence against women, not only through increases in domestic violence but also from external actors (Gevers, Musuya and Bukuluki, 2020). Displacement caused by extreme weather events is also deeply gendered: an estimated four out of five displaced people are women, and women are fourteen times more likely to die during extreme weather events than men, owing to factors such as limited mobility, reduced participation in decision-making, and constrained access to resources (United Nations, 2022).

Differentiated and Distinct Vulnerabilities

A critical contribution of intersectional analysis in the climate context is the distinction Carr and Thompson (2014) draw between differentiated vulnerabilities (where individuals within a population respond differently to the same climate stress) and distinct vulnerabilities (where individuals face entirely different climate stresses and impacts). Both forms are obscured by a nonintersectional gender analysis.

Evidence from across the Global South illustrates these dynamics clearly. In Malawi, women face greater climate-related risks than men because they are responsible for collecting water and firewood, tasks that require travelling further as environmental conditions deteriorate, increasing physical labour, time demands, and exposure to gender-based violence (Pearse, 2016, p. 3). In Bangladesh, similar patterns emerge: women face higher climate-related mortality, increased workloads, sexual harassment risks, and near-total exclusion from disaster management activities (Pearse, 2016, p. 4). In Costa Rica, even as extreme weather events made domestic tasks significantly harder, the division of labour did not change: women continued to bear sole responsibility for water collection, cooking, and family care (Janet Henshall Momsen, 2020, p. 145).

These patterns reflect the same underlying dynamic that Pearse (2016, p. 4) identifies across contexts: women's heightened vulnerability to climate change is rooted in poverty, poor nutrition, heavy domestic responsibilities, and limited capacity to prepare food storage or housing ahead of floods and cyclones. These are societal conditions, not natural ones.

Intra-gender differences are equally important to acknowledge. A study in Mexico found that women's knowledge was critical to food security and survival during droughts and extreme weather events, but women's responses were varied, not uniform (Pearse, 2016). This undermines any assumption of a homogeneous 'women's experience' of climate change. In Nepal, men with little or no land left their communities to seek work elsewhere during climate shocks, while men with larger landholdings stayed. The wives of men who left subsequently faced increased workloads and barriers to economic and resource access, a consequence of their historically limited social power and market participation (Pearse, 2016, p. 5).

In the agricultural sector, Carr and Thompson (2014) highlight how institutional bias further compounds these disparities. Programmes premised on the assumption that 'men are the farmers' systematically disadvantage women in agriculture, who often grow crops that are more sensitive to climate variability and who lack equal access to development resources and adaptation support. Such programmes may help farmers in general while actively harming women farmers, an outcome that only an intersectional analysis would reveal in advance.

As Carr and Thompson (2014, p. 188) observe, narrowly framed gender analyses of climate vulnerability may be less productive than broader efforts to understand locally specific identities and activities that intersect to produce varying vulnerabilities within agrarian communities and even individual households. Most contemporary analyses, they argue, fall short of current understandings of gender as a social categorisation that takes meaning from its intersection with other identities, roles, and responsibilities.

Implications for Development Strategy

Taken together, both case studies demonstrate that generic, one-size-fits-all development programmes are not simply suboptimal; they are actively exclusionary. The implications for programme design are significant.

Consider a women's shelter in Kyiv. On its face, such a facility represents meaningful progress. But without intersectional analysis, certain groups may be unknowingly excluded: Roma women facing discrimination from staff or residents may choose not to seek help there; women with disabilities may be unable to reach or enter the building if ramps and accessible facilities are absent; LGBTQIA+ women may encounter an unwelcoming or unsafe environment. The shelter exists, but for these groups, it may as well not.

The same logic applies to climate adaptation programmes. Interventions aimed at 'farmers' or 'women' that do not account for land ownership, crop type, mobility, domestic burdens, and ethnicity will systematically reach some while bypassing others, often the most vulnerable.

Addressing these gaps requires development actors to move beyond binary gender frameworks and adopt several concrete practices.

• First, disaggregated data collection (accounting for disability, ethnicity, displacement status, sexuality, age, and other relevant variables) is essential to making hidden vulnerabilities visible.

• Second, development workers should partner with local representative organisations: Roma women's groups, disability organisations, and LGBTQIA+ networks should be included as co-designers of programmes, not merely consulted after the fact. This builds trust, ensures relevance, and helps ensure that aid genuinely reaches those it is intended for.

• Third, in climate and agricultural contexts, programmes must explicitly recognise and challenge the institutional biases, such as the assumption that men are the primary farmers, that cause well-intentioned interventions to replicate structural inequalities.

More broadly, steps to address structural inequalities such as unequal land ownership, restricted resource access, and the underrepresentation of women in decision-making are prerequisites for building lasting resilience. Without tackling these foundations, even well-designed targeted interventions will remain partial solutions.

Conclusion

This essay has argued that intersectional analysis is not an optional methodological refinement, but a fundamental requirement for effective development practice. Through the cases of violence against women in conflict-affected Ukraine and gendered experiences of climate change, it has demonstrated that nonintersectional approaches, however useful for documenting broad trends, systematically fail to capture the specific vulnerabilities and barriers that different groups face.

A nonintersectional analysis can tell us that GBV increased by 36% in Ukraine since 2022 (UN Women, 2025), or that women are disproportionately affected by climate-related displacement. But it cannot tell us that Roma women are denied access to shelters, that women with disabilities face compounded insecurity, that trans persons cannot access hormone therapy in displacement, or that women farmers growing climate-sensitive crops are bypassed by gender-blind agricultural programmes. These are not peripheral details; they are the difference between aid that reaches the most vulnerable and aid that inadvertently excludes them.

By recognising that overlapping social identities produce differentiated and distinct vulnerabilities, development actors can move from generic interventions to targeted, equitable, and dynamic responses that do not reinforce pre-existing inequalities, but actively work to dismantle them.

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