If ever there has been a time to debunk the myth that death is a great leveller it’s now. COVID 19 has highlighted in technicolour how class, ethnicity and gender as in every other aspect of life affect our individual chances and outcomes.
In the war of the sexes, there is a familiar dynamic. Men are exponentially more likely to die directly of COVID 19 than women. The reasons are unclear: initial ideas about smoking habits - more than 50% of men in China smoke, versus 5% of women - and men’s apparent relative disinclination to wash their hands or use soap (a phenomenon I had hoped didn’t extend beyond teenage boys…), seem to be discounted and the focus is now on other physiological predispositions.
Just as female lives tend in general to be longer but not necessarily better, so the effects of the pandemic on women are felt more indirectly. Whilst they are less likely to die women are more likely to suffer in other ways. According to the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies, women are approximately 33% more likely to work in a sector heavily impacted or even entirely shut down as a result of the current lockdown and pandemic. Women are heavily represented in the retail and hospitality sectors for example. Single parents are hit harder (according to Gingerbread, approx, 90% of single parents are women). Even if you have a frontline job in the NHS, it is now much more difficult if not impossible to organise childcare around your shifts if you are a lone parent.
Alongside their economic disadvantage, we also have to accept the ugly truth that confinement can be much more physically dangerous for women trapped in abusive relationships. The UK charity Refuge reported well over 100% increase in calls to its helpline since the start of the UK’s stay-at-home policy. Whilst some of these calls will be from men, a significant majority of victims are women. For those not blighted by abuse, the home can nonetheless remain a site of exploitation. Wives and mothers bear most of the “second shift” of housework on top of the day job (they do 40% more housework than their male co-habitees, according to Marie Claire magazine) and also carry a greater share of the emotional load of family life. Deprived of a work environment to escape to and without much of the help at home many working women rely on, women may well find their careers suffer more than their partners’ as they adapt to the new normal of enforced working and schooling from home.
Other myths to be firmly debunked are those extolling women’s particular abilities to deal with this (or any other) crisis. There is no reliable evidence to suggest that women are better multi-taskers than men. According to lots of research (most recently a German 2019 study), nobody is any good at multi-tasking, although women get more practice as in general they do more work than their male counterparts. Nor do women enjoy an inherent empathy advantage, other than the ability that experiencing greater prejudice gives you to put yourself in other less fortunate people’s shoes. Any study that claims to show otherwise has failed to separate out inherent advantages from learned attitudinal differences and engrained societal views about the characteristics of girls and boys. Whilst it’s tempting to make ourselves feel better by bigging up the gender difference narrative that men are from mars (the god of war and all things macho) and all good empathetic Venus-like leaders are women, if we truly want women to progress, this kind of rhetoric needs to stop. Merkel, Sturgeon and Ardern are each their own women and whilst I admire Sturgeon’s direct leadership at this time, my personal view is that she is tough as old boots and a pretty shrewd political operator, and I mean that as a compliment. There are also probably quite a few good male leaders around right now: Moon Jae-In for example perhaps? But as they don’t fit the “in a time of crisis we need a woman leader” mantra, they get very little coverage in the gender literature (if you can call it that).
So what hope is there that rather than entrenching female stereotypes, this new normal might help us move beyond them? Well, if you look hard enough you can find small shoots. One is the role reversal that lockdown has created in a material number of families. A study in the US by Michele Tertilt from Mannheim University has shown that approximately 12% of heterosexual couples are experiencing a new normal. With the women in a front line job and the male partner teleworking, and with little or no home help available, the men in these relationships are bearing the bulk of the family and home work, experiencing perhaps for the first time what it means to be a woman with a family in the workplace. With a longish lockdown, Tertilt is optimistic that the experience might have lasting effects on the individual families and more broadly in society.
I remain unconvinced: perhaps it is just another piece of research confirming that true empathy is learned the hard way, and that if we want to change the world, we need powerful men (and women) to experience first hand what it is to be disadvantaged and then to want to bring about change. At the very least lockdown has shown us that when we are motivated or sufficiently threatened, the world can change, and change fast.