Chatelaine
- Chris Turner
Rude jokes, hate mail and violent threats—for climate experts, it’s all
part of the job. That’s especially true for the women.
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Illustration: Alex Nabaum c/o THEISPOT
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Just months after the Alberta NDP’s surprise 2015 election win, Shannon
Phillips, the province’s new environment minister, travelled to Paris for what
would turn out to be a historic round of global climate change negotiations.
Alberta had long been a climate laggard, but Phillips was an ambitious and
relatively young force in the province’s politics—39 years old at the time—and
she was part of a wave of fresh faces in leadership. Phillips landed in Paris
alongside Alberta’s new premier, Rachel Notley, and Canada’s new prime minister,
Justin Trudeau, who were both committed to taking big steps after a decade of
foot-dragging under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
It was an exciting time to be a cabinet minister working on climate change—the
meeting produced what’s known as the Paris Agreement, the first major
international pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol
nearly 20 years earlier. And right away, Phillips noticed a remarkable detail
about the negotiations: the number of women present. At every meeting, the
tables were crowded with female ministers, female negotiators, female scientists
and activists.
“A massive amount of the heavy lifting around the world on this matter is being
done by women,” says Phillips, who still represents her Lethbridge-West riding
in the Alberta legislature. “You see more women on panels. You see more women in
the negotiating spaces. You see more women in leadership positions on
climate.”
But, as Phillips learned, that prominence came saddled with an added burden. As
her government rolled out its climate change plan, she became a target for
misogynistic abuse. There was no communications channel immune to the attacks.
Social media platforms provided the greatest volume of vitriol, but occasional
hateful messages also arrived via email, written letters and phone calls.
For Phillips, Facebook was the worst. Staff at her Lethbridge constituency
office took on the work of scrolling through her feed, deleting enraged,
expletive-laden posts and deciding if any represented sufficiently serious
threats to alert local police. Lethbridge is a small city and its political
circles smaller still, and Phillips’ staff could sometimes trace threatening
posts to someone only one or two degrees of separation away from the
politician’s family, friends and inner circle.
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Lethbridge West politician Shannon Phillips
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As a cabinet minister, Phillips couldn’t spend her days engaging in online
shouting matches. “You have some constraints that are real,” she says. “It’s
hard to fight back. So you just retreat.” The cacophony of abusive language
simply became part of the background noise of her job.
That’s a ubiquitous experience for women leading the global climate change
effort. From climate scientists who explain scientific facts to the public, to
politicians unveiling climate legislation, to teenagers taking to the streets to
demand a better future, women have formed the front line in this pitched
political battle.
They are among the fiercest advocates for action, and a
relentless barrage of abuse is unleashed upon them in response. There is no more
important political arena in the world today than addressing climate change, and
few as ugly and openly misogynistic. There is real heroism simply in
persevering.
The intensity of the hate endured by women working on climate issues is
partially due to the overall tenor of the conversation—deeply divisive,
freighted with highly technical terminology and thrown off course for decades by
ferocious and well-funded efforts to obscure the basic scientific facts of the
crisis.
Men working on climate change action, whether as politicians, scientists
or activists, also become objects of hate.
Michael Mann,
an outspoken climate scientist at Penn State University, once received an
envelope full of mysterious white powder in the mail (it turned out to be corn
starch), among other abuses. He is far from alone.
For women, though, the scale and intensity are orders of magnitude greater.
Women exercising authority of any sort endure a certain amount of gender-based
vilification, and climate change advocacy inevitably amplifies it. Several
recent studies have noted that climate change represents a particularly sharp
challenge to traditional ideas about masculinity.
A 2014 Swedish study, for
example, found that climate change was seen as a threat to what researcher
Martin Hultman
has called the male “industrial breadwinner” identity, causing many men “to
perceive climate activism as inherently feminine.”
Another study found that men were more likely than women to view acts of
environmental stewardship in general as threats to masculinity. A British market
research firm has dubbed this the
“eco gender gap,”
noting that products branded as “green” were much more likely to be purchased by
women than by men. Climate change blends all these factors together, creating a
uniquely powerful catalyst for gendered abuse.
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Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to an audience in Germany
in February 2020.
Photo: Christian Charisius/DPA via ZUMA Press
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Every female climate scientist who achieves any prominence has seen her social
media mentions fill with schoolyard insults, disparaging descriptions of her
appearance and threats of sexual violence.
Every politician in the spotlight on
the climate front becomes a target for partisan attacks. Young women who take on
leadership roles are met with condescension regarding their abilities and
contempt regarding their motives. And once such abuse reaches a particular
volume and pitch, it spills over from the online world to real life.
Last October, Swedish student activist
Greta Thunberg
landed in Alberta to participate in one of the climate strikes her leadership
has inspired around the world. While she was there, a camera-wielding
contributor to the right-wing outlet Rebel Media tracked her to her Edmonton
hotel. In a video that’s still up on YouTube, he follows her down a hallway and
clearly identifies her location—a shocking intrusion on the safety of a
16-year-old girl. In climate politics, nothing appears to be out of bounds.
In Canada, Rebel Media has loomed large in the deterioration of the discourse
around climate change. If there was an initial flashpoint for climate misogyny
in this country, it was early 2016, when the outlet began using the term
“Climate Barbie” to refer to then federal environment minister Catherine
McKenna.
The phrase, alongside the usual load of misogynistic abuse hurled at
female cabinet ministers, had burbled in the background during the first months
of McKenna’s tenure. On the advice of her staff, McKenna had largely ignored the
taunts and the condescending name. But once Rebel Media began popularizing it,
usage rapidly amped up. And one particular day in September 2017, McKenna
decided she’d had enough.
“I was at the UN,” McKenna says, “and it was late. We had had a day of meetings
with international leaders on climate change and I came back [to my hotel] and I
saw my Twitter feed had exploded.” The reason? The Conservative MP Gerry Ritz
had replied to a news story about the Paris emissions cuts with a tweet reading,
“Has anyone told our climate Barbie!”
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Photo: Courtesy Catherine McKenna
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In the lingo of social media, McKenna decided to clap back. “Do you use that
sexist language about your daughter, mother, sister?” she wrote. “We need more
women in politics. Your sexist comments won’t stop us.” In the face of a barrage
of criticism,
Ritz deleted the tweet
and apologized for using a term that “is not reflective of the role the Minister
plays.”
From then on, McKenna took on her critics from time to time. In a press
scrum a few weeks after Ritz’s tweet, she confronted a Rebel Media contributor
directly. In response to a question about Canada’s electricity mix, she replied,
“So you’re the Rebel Media that happens to call me ‘Climate Barbie.’ I certainly
hope that you will no longer use that hashtag.”
“I realized that calling these things out every once in awhile is actually
good,” she says now. “Because I felt that I had to bite my tongue a lot, and I
didn’t think it was okay. And it’s not that it’s all about me . . . It’s about
girls and women who want to get into politics who would see these horrible
things.” McKenna says pushing back makes her feel “empowered,” but the
consequences of the abuse could not be so readily contained.
After several
encounters with angry strangers—including having profanities hurled at her from
a passing car as she walked with her children—she was required to take on a
security detail for her public appearances as environment minister.
Even for women with platforms much less prominent, talking about climate change
in public is a powerful magnet for misogynistic abuse. Leah Stokes, a
Canadian-born professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, began
making media appearances in early 2019 to discuss how to transform the energy
sector. She noticed a distinct shift as her social media following grew. “When
you get to 10,000,” she says, “things start to get crazy for women on
Twitter.”
Her response has been to put hours of conscious effort into building community
and encouraging civility on social media. Stokes thanks colleagues for
mentioning her work, goes out of her way to post praise of theirs and makes
regular recommendations of other scientists to follow.
“I see so many women advocates doing that,” says Stokes, adding it’s partly an
effort to share the spotlight, and ensure a diversity of voices. “I think the
darker side of it is that it’s a way of protecting ourselves. It’s the kind of
extra emotional labour we have to do . . . that I just don’t think men have to
do at all.”
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University of California at Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes.
Photo: Courtesy Leah Stokes
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Even with that extra labour, Stokes sometimes finds the climate battlefield more
than she wants to take on.
In the fall of 2019, a
New York Times reporter contacted Stokes for an analysis of the climate
and energy policies being floated by Democratic leadership candidates. She
decided not to go on the record with her thoughts.
“If I took a position different from some of the activists…I would get
attacked,” Stokes says. The
Times reporter spoke to several other women
for the story, but none agreed to be quoted. When the piece ran, it was
criticized for failing to include the voices of female experts.
Stokes, like many women working in climate advocacy today, points to another
Canadian climate scientist,
Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University,
as a role model. Hayhoe has become a widely cited voice on how to talk to a
reluctant public about climate change—in part because she is an unabashed
Christian and political moderate in a field whose most prominent spokespeople
tend to be neither of those things. Hayhoe also has an extraordinary gift for
delivering calm, clear messages in the midst of the climate crossfire.
“What’s at the bottom of all of this is fear,” Hayhoe says. “Fear that the world
is changing really fast. And it’s changing in ways that make a lot of people
uncomfortable, because they feel like they’re being left behind.” All those
fears have triggered a multivalent storm of toxic, reactionary
politics—nationalism, sexism, racism and hostility toward expertise of all
sorts.
As Hayhoe notes, a female scientist talking about a need for dramatic
socio-economic changes in order to address an issue associated with progressive
causes becomes a lightning rod for virtually the entire turbulent mess of
grievances.
Hayhoe has come in for constant abuse and threats. She has removed personal
information from her online bios because she was receiving strange packages and
letters both at work and at home. The less frightening sexism takes a toll, too.
In June 2019, when Hayhoe was called to give testimony before the United States
Congress, congressmen who had addressed her male colleagues as “doctor”
condescendingly referred to her as “young lady.”
“When I’m the second oldest person on the panel, and I am an expert with 25
years of experience testifying in my field, to address me in that manner is
frankly unprofessional and inappropriate,” says Hayhoe, who has a PhD, more than
100 peer-reviewed climate science publications and is the director of Texas
Tech’s Climate Center, among other things. “Yet, it’s common.”
She’s stopped trying to defend her expertise. “I had to consciously give up the
right to be respected and correctly represented,” Hayhoe says. “I don’t like it,
but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to reach the people who can engage in
respectful dialogue.”
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Katharine Hayhoe.
Photo: Ashley Rodgers, Texas Tech University
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The task is admirable, and it is bearing fruit—climate change has moved firmly
into the centre of the political arena across North America and support for
action is building.
At the same time, the greater visibility of both the issue
and the women who carry on the fight almost certainly means that misogynistic
blowback will get worse before it gets better. And it continues to transpire in
a rapidly evolving social media environment in which there are still no
established norms, let alone government protocols or law-enforcement
strategies.
McKenna says her office and her government have brought up the abuse directly
with social media companies. The response has been rote expressions of regret
and suggestions to report every transgression—which, she notes ruefully,
would’ve occupied her entire staff all day, every day, at the peak of her
visibility as environment minister.
Otherwise, there is no promise of action on
the horizon, and police are often no more help. Phillips says nothing was done
to investigate the threatening messages her office reported, which she calls “a
form of intimidating people who are duly elected.” She wonders—without much
hope—if CSIS or the RCMP will ever see it that way.
In the meantime, there is the everyday heroism of the women engaged in the
climate change battle—who are all quick to insist the duty to act and the
opportunity to carve out an even larger space for female leadership balances out
the abuse. “Change is worth it,” says Phillips. “And from my perspective of
being a partisan politician, being the boss is worth it.”
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