Due to their gender specific roles and responsibilities, women, girls, boys and men often have different mobility patterns and hold different information on areas that are contaminated, or suspected of being contaminated in their communities. If not all groups are consulted in information gathering activities, vital and life-saving information may be lost. 

In other areas of mine action, such as victim assistance and risk education, gender determines the access to and impact of activities and services, where females often face more restrictions compared to males. In some countries women can be harder to reach when implementing surveys, especially by male surveyors. As a result, this means that their priorities – frequently also the priorities of their children and of basic community survival – can be excluded.

In most landmine/ERW affected countries men are more likely to be caught in an accident (85-90% of landmine victims are boys and men) than women. Women, however, do face other types of vulnerabilities. For instance, due to inequalities in access to health facilities, women might receive less emergency care, which could result in higher fatality rates for females than for males.

Female survivors might also face a higher risk of being stigmatised, marginalised and even abandoned by their spouses and families because of their disabilities. When women are the indirect victims of landmine/ERW accidents, they often bear the consequences in terms of having to care for the injured and/or provide an income for the family, if the victim was the main income provider.