Gendering the environment: Global trends in gendered portfolio allocations in the face of climate change

Is environmental concern “women’s work”? Over the past few decades, the environmental ministry has proven one of the rare policy areas where women’s representation has steadily increased. However, these changes have not been met with women’s representational growth in energy, transportation, or finance ministries, despite the growing influence of these latter departments on climate policymaking. Using the WhoGov international dataset (Nyrup & Bramwell, 2020), this paper explores global trends related to men’s and women’s cabinet appointments in the context of climate change. I suggest that the composition of government ministries and cabinets is indicative of increasingly gendered conceptions of environmental responsibility, reflecting the influence of gender norms in the state construction of climate change as a political problem. Recognizing that cabinets and ministries serve as unique sites of gender production, I argue that symbolic representation and feminist institutionalism offer useful theoretical tools that can help reveal the symbolic and material consequences of gendered gatekeeping in state institutions in the face of increasingly detrimental environmental transformations.