The Role of Gender, Age and Income in Demand Side Management Acceptance: A Literature Review

Demand-side management (DSM) programs aiming to both reduce and render household consumption more flexible, are becoming increasingly essential due to energy crises and the growing integration of renewable energy into energy production. The involvement of households and energy users is crucial to fully unlock the potential of DSM programs. As this paper demonstrates, despite more than thirty years of feminist scholarly work focusing on the home as an important site of the production of gender inequality, few of these insights have been taken into account by DSM-designers. Additionally, we note a broader pattern concerning gaps in knowledge regarding the diverse perspectives of energy users and their domestic contexts, all of which create obstacles to successful rollout and scalability. This paper uses the concept of the social license to automate and insight from feminist research to analyse the literature on DSM programs. We find three primary barriers in household DSM programs: 1) there is an unresolved tension between DSM technology being perceived as a masculine domain
and the home as a feminine domain, 2) low-income households face challenges in accessing the technology needed to enable both flexibility and savings, and 3) disparities in opportunities for participation among elderly and young individuals in DSM programs and their complex reasons are insufficiently considered. Based on these findings we argue that user diversity needs to form a starting point in DSM program design for fair and scalable solutions.