Women Live In Ways That Emit Less Carbon Than Men – So What? – CleanTechnica

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A May 2025 study from the London School of Economics and Political Science reveals that women in France emit 26% less carbon than men with their diet and transport usage. Why does this matter? What difference does it make?

It’s clear that mitigating climate change requires us to shift our consumption patterns, and it’s time to do some self-reflection about our carbon footprints in high-emission sectors like diet and methods of getting to and from our workplaces and leisure activities.

A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual. It is calculated by summing the emissions resulting from every stage of a product or service’s lifetime — that includes from how the materials we use are produced, to their manufacture, and all the way through to their end of life.

What people eat and how they commute make up about a half of the average French person’s carbon footprint.

As a result of dietary choices, driving used as the main method of transportation, and out-and-out excessive energy consumption in comparison to other countries in the world, the average US carbon footprint of people is higher than that of other countries. The average US person’s carbon footprint is estimated to be around 16 tons per year; a French person’s average is 9.2 tons. We in the US can learn from the French . What’s the difference in consumption habits in France?

Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment study authors Berland and Leroutier argue that understanding the distribution of carbon footprints across population groups is crucial for designing fair and acceptable climate policies.

In fact, what they call “back-of-the-envelope” calculations indicate that emissions from other goods and services would need to be at least 80% lower for men to fully cancel out the gender gap in food and transport emissions.

Significantly, if all adult men adopted the same carbon intensity of food consumption as adult women, without affecting women’s consumption, food carbon footprints would decrease by 1.9 MtCO2e and transport carbon footprints by 11.5 MtCO2e in France.

The United States is the second highest emitting country in the world — right behind China. Climate change is a US national emergency. A culture in the US is transmitted in which consumption is good, and residents hardly notice the effects of their average US carbon footprint.

• A positive and increasing association between meat consumption and evolving masculinity exists from infancy to late adulthood in US males.
• Even with the increasing transition to transportation electrification and accompanying lower emissions, auto manufacturers have hesitated to relinquish their normative US brand staples of muscle, power, and speed that is associated with male buying power.
• The norm of “Keeping up with the Joneses” is part of the US downfall — we want to buy the newest version of technology and toys, which contributes to an excessive carbon footprint.
• People in the US, on average, spend approximately 90% of their time indoors. When indoors, humans use a lot of fossil fuels.
  • The IEA estimates that “space cooling” — mostly air conditioning but also fans — consumed around 2,100 terawatt-hours (TWh) of power in 2022.
  • Fuel-burning appliances including cooking stoves, furnaces and water heaters can create emissions that are harmful to our health and the environment.

The Prize for Healthier, Less Carbon-Contributing Food Goes to Women

The balance of scales is upended when we’re talking about eating less or even no meat. Eating red meat is a marker of male identity. It also reveals the role of gender differences in preferences in creating disparities in carbon footprints.

The study in the American Journal of Health describes how men historically consume more meat than women, show fewer intentions to reduce meat consumption, and are underrepresented among vegans and vegetarians. Eating meat, the authors say, strongly aligns with normative masculinities — “real men” eat meat. In fact, many veg*n (vegan or vegetarian) men were “apologetic, concealing, and/or conflicted in their public alignments to hegemonic masculinity, as they attempted to negotiate their dietary practices with traditional tenets of masculinity, rather than embodying traditionally feminine values such as compassion.”

The authors also found that household structure plays a key role in shaping the carbon footprint gap. People in a couple seem to converge on food, with women having more carbon-intensive diets than their single counterparts.

On the other hand, gender differences in transport footprint are especially large for couples with children. Who people live with — and how roles are divided — can significantly shape their climate impact. The implication is that adopting consumption patterns compatible with net zero objectives may be less difficult for women than for men.

Aren’t Women Weaker than Men, Though?

“If reducing emissions is more costly for men than for women in these countries, loss aversion and motivated reasoning may make them less concerned with the reality of climate change, ” the authors explain. It’s hard for people in the US culture to accept shifting norms around food and car consumption. Perhaps taking a step back and translating these ideas into the realm of sports can illuminate us to systemic change.

Across a variety of sports, women are not just catching up after generations of exclusion from athletics — they’re establishing new records. Women’s noteworthy accomplishments are signifiers of the strength on women’s bodies. The high levels of women’s performance in athletics are part of a larger picture of cultural attributes that need to be recognized and reconsidered.

Okay, so when sports media rant and rave about sports excellence, they’re generally yakking about strength — extreme force displayed over short distances. Sure, that was the dominant western construct  beginning in the 20th century, yet for centuries women’s lives required stamina, recovery, resilience, and adaptability. Those qualities are evident in today’s superior women’s athletic performance. Endurance capacity is likely due to female bodies preferentially using slow-burning fat over quickly exhausted carbohydrates, in both athletes and less sporty people, studies have shown.

Since women’s physiology rivals men’s in these areas, a new standard for physiology can correlate with gender-based habits where consumption yields less carbon.

That takes us back to the study about French women and consumption habits that generate less carbon emissions. The social science literature emphasizes the connection between red meat consumption and male identity as well as cars and male identity.

There’s a lesson here buried within the data, though.

Work-related emissions play a key role in the transport gap in carbon footprints. The transportation gap in France comes partly from a composition effect: women are more likely to live in large cities and poorer households and are more often unemployed or outside the labor force, all characteristics associated with lower carbon footprints.

Perhaps the key here is when genders have equal opportunities and learn together how to consume less carbon, they’re healthier — and so is the world.