The Last Mile of Gender Equality: Why Sendai Reaches the Shore but Leaves Women Holding the Household ( SDG 5)

Disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate adaptation policies increasingly refer to gender equality, but the practical reach of ‘gender mainstreaming’ is uneven across social groups and implementation settings. This paper develops an empirical theory—Intersectional Reach Theory of Gender‐Responsive DRR (IRT‐GRDRR)—to explain why and how apparently similar global policies can reproduce gender and intersecting forms of inequality in disaster contexts. We combine (i) a structured document analysis of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) and the targets of SDG 5, (ii) a rapid evidence synthesis of peer‐reviewed publications on three intervention domains that are prominent in Sendai implementation (local DRR and resilience strategies, traditional and Indigenous knowledge, and nature‐based solutions), and (iii) an empirical illustration from the Indian Sundarbans Delta using feminist political ecology‐informed interviews and focus group discussions. Using the SDG‐interactions scoring methodology (from −3 to +3) and developing weighted averages, we find widespread ‘reach gaps’ where DRR interventions interact positively with some SDG 5 target outcomes (participation and sexual and reproductive health) and weakly or negatively with others (access to technology and the reallocation of care work). Reach gaps arose from four mechanisms: categorical simplification of ‘women’ in the policy discourse; uneven access to risk information; tokenistic participation; and the externalisation of the burden of adaptation onto feminised low‐paid and unpaid care work. The study generates four empirical propositions (P1–P4) based on reach gaps, which have clear policy implications for gender‐responsive DRR that are auditable across scales.