To solve the climate crisis we need three things – and we need them together.
Feminine leadership is not the same as women in leadership roles. It refers to a set of qualities our male-dominated world structurally lacks – especially in positions of influence. Many women in power have had to adopt the standard masculine style just to get there; many men could lead differently if the culture allowed it. The book identifies seven qualities that solving the climate crisis demands:
From ego and competition to cooperation and the common good. Power is shared; space is created for others to grow.
Open, transparent decision-making instead of small exclusive circles. Solutions fail when voices are excluded.
The climate crisis is ultimately about people. Care for society and nature is a leadership quality, not a weakness.
Vulnerability is courage. Combining reason with emotion makes leadership authentic – and decisions better.
Everything is interrelated. Following pioneer Donella Meadows: find the leverage points where change multiplies.
Long-term and intergenerational thinking, instead of the short-term gains our current economy rewards.
Greater representation of women in governance is associated with policies that strengthen rights, equality and quality of life – especially for marginalized groups.
The payoff is innovation and better risk awareness: research on organizational decision-making shows that homogeneous leadership groups are more prone to groupthink, while greater gender and cognitive diversity improves oversight – a lesson underscored by the failures preceding the 2007–2008 financial crisis. And the good news for men: these qualities can be learned. Feminine leadership is an invitation, not an exclusion.
Two problems meet at the intersection of gender and climate. First: women bear the heaviest impacts. In countries with high gender inequality, women face disaster mortality risks typically 1.5 to more than three times higher than men's; in documented disasters – the 2004 tsunami, Cyclone Nargis, the European heatwaves – women frequently made up 60 to 80 percent of fatalities. Not because of biology, but because of unequal access to information, resources and decision-making. In climate-related displacement, women and children typically account for 60 to 70 percent of those displaced.
Second: women remain under-represented in designing the solutions. The pattern runs through every key sector of the transition. In agriculture, women form a large share of the workforce in many countries yet hold only roughly 13–15 percent of agricultural land, limiting their ability to adapt. Household air pollution from polluting cooking fuels causes more than three million premature deaths each year – disproportionately women and children – while women make up only about a fifth of the energy workforce. In public transport, surveys across many countries show a large majority of women have experienced harassment or feel unsafe, even though women rely on it more. Water, sanitation and menstrual health quietly determine whether girls can even stay in school.
The reverse is also true – and this is the opportunity: every step toward gender equality makes climate action more effective. That evidence fills Part IV.
Climate policy has long been too elitist and too exclusive – recent analyses found more fossil-fuel lobbyists accredited at COP28 than the combined delegations of the ten most climate-vulnerable countries. Climate justice turns the lens around: using an equality-based "fair share" approach, one widely cited study estimates that the Global North accounts for about 92 percent of historical "excess" CO₂ emissions beyond safe limits. Those who contributed most must take the greatest responsibility.
Justice also means seeing the whole person. Through the lens of intersectionality – a term coined in 1989 by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw – the book shows how gender, race, income, disability, age and sexual orientation interact in climate vulnerability: communities of color exposed to more pollution; residents with disabilities who could not evacuate the 2021 German floods; older people and children in heatwaves; poorer households with the least resilient housing.
And it is an intergenerational question: those who will live longest with the consequences have the least say. The average member of the U.S. Congress is decades older than the median citizen; in the Netherlands more than half of eligible voters are over 50. Without equity – between countries, groups and generations – the climate crisis cannot be solved. With it, climate action becomes what it should be: a project that makes society fairer as it decarbonizes.
“To effectively address the climate crisis, we need three things: female leadership, gender equality and climate justice. Time to get to work.”