Does Extreme Heat Put Women at Greater Risk of Violence?

This one is heavier than most of what I write to you, so let's slow down for a second before we get into it. Take a breath. Okay.

Yes: a new 2026 study found that unusually warm periods raise the risk of intimate partner violence against women, and the effect is strongest for women living in rural areas with less education. Researchers also found something that matters just as much: the future isn't fixed by temperature alone. Education, economic independence, and investment in women's resilience measurably shrink the risk, which means this is a policy failure as much as a climate one, not an inevitability.

Does extreme heat really raise the risk of violence against women?

That's what researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) found when they analyzed 61 Demographic and Health Surveys collected between 2003 and 2024, covering women ages 15 to 49 across 31 sub-Saharan African countries. Published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, the study found that unusually warm conditions were linked to higher rates of emotional and physical intimate partner violence, though not sexual violence specifically.

Erich Striessnig, the study's corresponding author at IIASA and the University of Vienna, put it plainly: the effects were "particularly pronounced among women living in rural areas and those with a primary level of education or less." Co-author Roman Hoffmann added the hopeful half of the finding: "Investments in education, inclusive development and women's empowerment can help reduce vulnerability." Lead researcher Jonas Peisker was careful to note that heat isn't the whole story either, calling it "only one part of a much more complex picture."

That complexity shows up close to home too. Journalist Karina Huang reported for Ms. Magazine last month that women shoulder more of the burden of extreme heat almost everywhere, they spend more unpaid hours doing household labor in the hottest parts of the day, and they're more likely to skip air conditioning to stretch a tight budget. She pointed to a heat action plan in Ahmedabad, India that partners with the local Mahila Housing Trust to pay women workers for income lost during dangerous heat waves, exactly the kind of protection researchers say actually moves the needle. Compare that to most U.S. city heat plans, which barely mention women at all.

Why this matters even if you live somewhere cool

You don't need to live somewhere that hits 110 degrees for this to be about you. The pattern underneath the data is one you already know: heat costs women more than men in wages, health, and safety, largely because the systems built to handle a warming world weren't built with women's specific risks in mind. The same blind spot shows up in what researchers are only now learning about microplastics crossing into pregnancy, evidence that's been mounting for years while policy treats a pregnant body as an afterthought instead of a priority.

And the protective factor researchers keep circling back to, economic independence, isn't abstract for you either. It's the difference between staying somewhere unsafe and having the resources to leave. It's part of why it matters when the advice you get about your own money is worse than what a man would get asking the exact same question. Safety and money are not separate conversations. They never really were.

One thing to try today

If someone in your life has seemed more on edge, more trapped, or harder to reach this summer, reach out today. Not with advice, just a text that says you're thinking of them and you're around. And save this number somewhere you won't lose it: the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. You don't have to be in danger to call it for a friend, and you don't have to have the right words yet.

Quote to sit with

"We can do hard things."

Glennon Doyle wrote it in Untamed, and it became the phrase she built an entire podcast around, because she said it was the exact sentence that once saved her own life. It's short on purpose. Some days that's all you have room for.

💌 Sarah