Last week, the former member of the Portuguese Socialist Party and the current United Nations Secretary General linked the response to the COVID19 pandemic to gender inequality.
The secretary-general also pointed to “disturbing reports from around the world of skyrocketing levels of gender-based violence, as many women are effectively confined with their abusers, while resources and support services are redirected.”“In short,” he said, “the pandemic is exposing and exacerbating the considerable hurdles women face in achieving their rights and fulfilling their potential.And Guterres warned that “progress lost may take years, even generations, to recover.”The secretary-general issued a policy briefing in April on the impact of the pandemic on women and stressed again that they must be at the center of all efforts to tackle and recover from the coronavirus.“The pandemic is only demonstrating what we all know: that millennia of patriarchy have resulted in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture which damages everyone – women, men, girls and boys,” he said. “This is the time to rebuild more equal, inclusive and resilient societies.
I would like to note, before going into further details on the United Nation’s assertion, that men have been harder hit by the pathogen than women. I suppose that could be viewed as “toxic masculinity”, if one really wanted to stretch the definition.
Men and women have similar odds of contracting the virus, although there is some variation across countries: in some, women make up the majority of cases; in others, men do. But men face a higher risk of death than women,across the U.S. and indeed across the globe. In England and Wales, for example, male social care workers are dying from COVID-19 at a rate of 23.4 deaths per 100,000, compared to a rate of 9.6 for their female peers.Our colleague Shamika Ravi reports in her paper “COVID-19 trends from Germany show different impacts by gender and age,” that the gap may be growing as the pandemic spreads. As Ravi writes: “Remarkably, the mortality rate of men is rising significantly faster than mortality rate for women in Germany, for all age groups.”
Now, just in time for America’s “Labor Day”, the United Nations tweeted out another portion of Guterres’ address, which was a woke message linking the pandemic to the patriarchy.
President Donald Trump axed the funding for the United Nations’ World Health Organization in the wake of its covering China’s role in the origins of its pandemic and the agency’s lies about human transmissibility and masks at the start of the pathogen’s global spread.
Many Americans are taking a page from the “Defund the Police” movement, to create one that appears to have much wider appeal to our nation’s citizens.
The movement is growing fast, with a popular hashtag the I am sure Team Twitter is working overtime to suppress.
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