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Notwithstanding the powerful imagery of the female disaster victim awaiting male rescue, development workers, activists, and researchers know how centrally engaged women are at every stage of disaster preparation and response. Certainly, we also know how marginalized women are in disaster planning and mitigation. The powerful message from those most closely involved with women before, during, and after women is the need to balance capacity and vulnerability in our thinking about women and disaster.

The 1995 IDNDR campaign to focus on women and children as "keys to prevention" provided the impetus in many regions for increased activism and academic work on these issues. Increasingly, disaster social scientists are investigating both the social forces creating and sustaining gendered disaster vulnerability and the diverse and proactive responses women demonstrate in their communities when hazards become disasters. Over the past year, my US colleague Betty Morrow and I collected material for an edited book in this area, including scholarly papers, case studies, field reports and personal narrative. We undertook this project to make important new work more accessible to those whose lives or professions bring them to development, disaster, and gender equity work. Strikingly evident in our search was the lack of attention to gender relations in disaster in the US and other advanced industrial states, and the correspondingly greater visibility of the issues in Central America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and especially South Asia. Clearly, disaster managers have a lot to learn from women in these regions, and from women in their own home towns. We need new faces at the table when communities plan effective disaster responses and challenge economic, political, social structures placing them at risk. Challenging gender inequality is a stretch for disaster planners in virtually every nation, but to the degree that gender relations put women and girls at risk it must be at the heart of our agenda.

As women move forward on these issues at local, national, and regional levels, we need easier communication, organizational support, personal support from the those closest to us, and sustained recognition from all "stakeholders" that women must be full and equal partners in the challenge to build democratic, participatory, and disaster-resilient communities. We need to share "lessons learned," not from the next hurricane or flood, but from the grassroots leaders, women's community organizations, institutional activists, and innovative disaster responders who can offer practical guidelines on how best to engage a range of women as active and equal partners.

Toward this end, we must develop international networks to foster collaborative efforts among those working to identify and address women's immediate needs and long-term interests in disaster. For my part, a good step forward would be an international workshop for my own country's disaster managers and women's organizations to hear the experiences, observations, and recommendations of women already doing this work, from Pakistan to Costa Rica.

We need regional and global networks of practitioners, academics, and activists to sustain the emerging focus on women in disaster, and move women from the margin to the center of local and global disaster initiatives. Using new information technologies but also old-fashioned letters, phone, travel, and meetings, we can share new ways of theorizing and new models of responding to disaster which empower rather than disadvantage women. We must insist upon the centrality of women and gender relations in the global project of mitigating hazards and reducing disasters through more sustainable patterns of development. Our best work will be done together, working across differences to collaborate around the unifying theme of gender, disaster reduction, and sustainable development.

Elaine Enarson is an American sociologist currently affiliated with the Disaster Preparedness Resources Centre and the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations, both of the University of British Columbia. She is co-editor with Betty Morrow of The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through the Eyes of women, forthcoming from Greenwood Press. Her current research involves domestic violence and disaster in Canada and the US.