What Happens to Gender Equality When Crisis Becomes the New Normal?
An Alliance-funded research project asked a timely question: if we are constantly moving from one crisis to the next, what does that mean for women—and for the way we understand gender inequality?
From climate change and political polarization to economic upheaval and gender-based violence, crises can disrupt everyday life while also exposing inequalities that were already there.
That tension was at the center of “Women in Times of Crisis: Rethinking the Extraordinary and the Everyday,” an Alliance Joint Research Project bringing together scholars from Columbia University, Sciences Po, and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Supported by a $15,000 Alliance grant, the project included an international conference, literature reviews, research visits, scholarly work, and a public-facing animated video.
When Crisis Reveals the Everyday
Held on October 18, 2024, the project’s conference examined how crises affect gender dynamics across issues including climate change, labor, political polarization, gender-based violence, and community resistance.
A central takeaway was that crises can intensify existing inequalities—but they can also reveal how fragile social progress can be and create opportunities to rethink established norms and policies. The conference emphasized the importance of approaches that center women’s experiences and agency.
The event featured 12 panel presentations and three keynote presentations, building on a preparatory literature review by Tamar Ly, Youssef Sharaf, and Nicholas Sowels. The team later produced a detailed conference summary, with both the literature review and summary made publicly available through France’s HAL open-science platform.
Should Climate Change Affect Decisions About Having Children?
One of the project’s most compelling research outcomes grew from a question at the intersection of climate change, demography, and personal choice.
Following the conference, Angela Greulich of Sciences Po and Jackie Dugard of Columbia University developed a critical literature review examining the relationship between fertility and climate change.
Their research argues that numbers alone cannot capture the full complexity of this relationship. Instead, they bring together perspectives from economics, philosophy and ethics, human rights and justice, and psycho-social research on climate anxiety and reproductive decision-making.
The resulting work, titled “The association between fertility and climate change in and beyond empirical impact analysis: Can a shared rationale emerge?”, was reported by the project team as submitted to the peer-reviewed journal Comparative Population Studies in January 2026.
Fertility, Choice, and Climate Change
Greulich and Dugard took their research and created an animated video, “Fertility in the Context of Climate Change.”
Designed as a teaching and public-engagement resource, the video presents the ideas behind their research in a more accessible format for students at Columbia, Sciences Po, and beyond.
Rather than presenting fertility and climate change as a simple question of population size, the research behind the video asks viewers to consider the economic, ethical, social, and human-rights dimensions of reproductive choices in a warming world.
The video is one of several lasting outcomes of “Women in Times of Crisis,” demonstrating how an Alliance Joint Research Project can move from interdisciplinary conversation to new scholarship—and ultimately bring that research to audiences beyond academia.
Watch Fertility in the Context of Climate Change: Watch the video
This article is based on the project’s final activity report and webpage summary submitted by the project’s principal investigators, as well as the research outputs described in those materials. The preparatory literature review was authored by Tamar Ly, Youssef Sharaf, and Nicholas Sowels; the conference summary was prepared by the same authors; and the fertility and climate change research and accompanying animated video were developed by Angela Greulich and Jackie Dugard.