Gender & Water Report
Gender and Everyday Household Water Use in Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a proving ground for urban water sustainability, but insufficient attention is paid to the social factors that shape our water use and management. Challenges for this global megacity include importing water, groundwater contamination, aging infrastructure, climate change unpredictability, and environmental justice issues such as water quality, access, and cost. Los Angeles experienced a record-setting drought between 2012 and 2016, with another between 2020 and 2023. After more than a century of population growth, Los Angeles imports most of its water from near and far, including regions with unsettled Indigenous water rights.
Scholars and policymakers agree that water issues disproportionately affect women and girls in the Global South, but too little attention has been paid to how gender shapes everyday water use in the Global North. UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center and its Sustainable LA Grand Challenge sought to address this knowledge gap with the Gender and Everyday Household Water Use in Los Angeles project. Researchers employed qualitative fieldwork to examine the role of gender—as it intersects with race, class, and migration—in understanding residential water use. Consistent with known facts that in the United States a) the household plays a key role in water management, and b) women are disproportionately responsible for household labor, this study found that gender plays an important yet little-understood role in water use and management in American households.
Report
Credits
This report was made in collaboration with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women | Streisand Center.
Written by Kelsey Kim and Jessica Cattelino
Research Team:
Jessica Cattelino, Principal Investigator
Megan Baker
Courtney Cecale
Ana Gonzalez
Kelsey Kim
Michael Kim
Dalila Ozier
Pwintphyu Nandar
Virdiana Velez
Recommended Citation:
Kim, Kelsey, Jessica Cattelino, Megan Baker, Courtney Cecale, Ana Gonzalez, Michael Kim, Dalila Ozier, Pwintphyu Nandar, and Virdiana Velez.
2024. Gender and Everyday Household Water Use in Los Angeles.
Published by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women Streisand
Center. https://csw.ucla.edu/research/gender-water/gender-and-everyday-household-water-use-in-los-angeles/
Research Support
This work was made possible by support from UCLA’s Sustainable LA Grand Challenge and the Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center.
The UCLA Center for the Study of Women Streisand Center works towards a world in which education and scholarship are tools for social justice feminism, improving the lives of people of all genders. The UCLA Center for the Study of Women is an internationally recognized center for research on gender, sexuality, and women’s issues and the first organized research unit of its kind in the University of California system. CSW housed this research project, physically and administratively, and provided research funding and publishing support.
The Sustainable LA Grand Challenge is UCLA’s incubator for strategic sustainability research initiatives, convening interdisciplinary, cross-sector research that leads to the development of knowledge that is responsive to societal needs, and that enables innovative change in policy, regulation and practice.
