I found this article interesting, especially Chapter 3, Subheading 3.4.
It discusses how gender relates to water systems and their governance. For instance, the longer it takes to collect water, the less time there is for other activities. While this can be a positive (one takeaway is that sometimes women like spending time gathering water because it means time away from home), it also means less time for education, investment, and making money.
Characterizing water collection across the globe, it usually falls on women to collect the water, leading to different impacts on men and women. As always it’s more complicated than that but I won’t summarize the entire article here.
But I will drop in a quote below:
… Gendered power relations often prevent women from taking part in water management activities.
Global Gender and Climate Alliance. (2016). CHAPTER 3: Climate Change and Gendered Livelihoods Impacts and Adaptation Strategies. In Gender and Climate Change: A Closer Look at the Existing Evidence. https://wedo.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGCA-RP-FINAL.pdf
At least in Kenya, this is because water management activities are tied to owning land, and “women do not typically own land.”
The “typically” is doing a lot of work there, which I would characterize as being linked to what is normal, which is tied to ideas about culture. I think this is a good example of how ideas about land-owning, citizenship, and water are tied together in what we can understand as having cultural dimensions that we might explore here on the blog.
The article is worth a read, and I’d encourage you to check it out!
Cultural Water Studies 