I came across this recent paper and popular science article from Nature Sustainability that cropped out on r/Science (link here). It highlights about how 81 Women Environmental Defenders have died in the last several years while defending natural ecosystems and that this is a major tragedy.

Now understandably this is a major tragedy. But the article felt suspicious as it seemed something was being omitted. Lo and behold, it takes until the 4th paragraph of the discussion for the authors to mention “Concerning gender-linked counts, of the 3,545 EJAtlas cases, only 523 (15%) involved WEDs.”

Aha! So we’re going to only focus on the women who have been killed as a result of their courageous efforts. Male disposability is a hell of a drug. This is right up there with Hillary Clinton’s infamous “women have always the primary victims of war because they lose their husbands and sons” quote and the “25% of homeless people are women” initiatives.

Fortunately almost all the comments at r/Science have also recognized this double standard, but the whole thing is a real shame. There was a real opportunity to highlight that there might be differences in gender related to environmental defenders. Maybe there are some specific ways that women are targeted that are really important to know. But the fact that one gender was essentially cherry-picked from the get go is a bummer. At least the database the authors used is open access for all. Hopefully someone is able to do the good science and compare all deaths of environmental defenders.