Patriarchal pandemic

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic here in Mexico last year, femicides and calls to domestic violence hotlines soared. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) – who had previously expressed annoyance that the femicide issue should distract from a very important project to raffle the presidential plane – then took it upon himself to claim that 90 percent of emergency hotline calls were false.

The AMLO government went on to release a public service video containing ludicrous advice on how to ostensibly prevent violence in the home, such as by taking a deep breath and counting to 10.

Of course, for many women in Mexico and around the world, the pandemic’s stay-at-home measures have produced a situation in which they effectively cannot breathe – much less deeply.

From Argentina to Malaysia and Sudan to the United Kingdom to the United States, there has been a surge in reports of violence against women. To be sure, there are more opportunities for domestic violence when people are confined to domestic space.

And yet the pandemic has disproportionately affected women in other ways, as well.

In numerous countries, females are overly represented in industries, such as hospitality and food services, that have suffered high job losses.

Globally, unpaid care and domestic work – the brunt of which also inevitably falls to women – has increased greatly in light of school closures and the like. Women in the US and elsewhere have been forced to quit their jobs in order to take care of their children, highlighting one of capitalism’s brutal conundrums: How, in the end, do you ‘take care’ of anyone if you do not have an income?

According to a 2019 survey of 104 countries, women comprise some 67 percent of the healthcare workforce, meaning they are at disproportionate risk on the Covid-19 front lines. They also are, on average, paid less than their male counterparts in the medical sector.

At the same time, in many places, the pandemic has seriously curtailed sexual and reproductive health services, depriving women and girls of their rights.

“Women are most affected by pandemics,” stressed a paper published in July in Nature, an international weekly journal of science. Despite the “lessons from past outbreaks”, the paper said, the World Health Organization had thus far failed to include critical sexual and reproductive health recommendations in its Covid-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan, with “grim” consequences: “Contraceptives are still out of stock in Indonesia, Mozambique and many other countries. Abortions in Italy were cancelled.”

Meanwhile, in cities around the United States – a nation that has long been the poster child for racist patriarchy – maternal mortality rates have reportedly shot up on account of the coronavirus situation, with Black women, in particular, dying disproportionately.

Excerpted: ‘COVID-19: The patriarchal pandemic’

Aljazeera.com