Spin Doctors by Nora Loreto

Author:Nora Loreto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

December 2020 The gendered impact

Cases: 378,139 Deaths: 12,1301

Even if the vaccine was offering a glimmer of hope that the pandemic might be over someday soon, the systemic issues that boiled over during the pandemic had no instant fix. December 7, 2020, was the 50th anniversary of the release of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, a report that made hundreds of recommendations for how to improve women’s lives in Canada. Looking back, a great deal of work had not yet happened, despite decades of progress. Canada still did not have a universal system of child care. Violence against women was still endemic and women’s participation in the job market had still not caught up to men’s. While gender equality was far from achieved before the pandemic hit, covid-19 devastated safety, social supports and labour market access for women and nonbinary people.

Unlike other identities, journalists and politicians talked a lot about gender. There was no shortage of attention on the gendered impact of the pandemic, which stood in stark contrast with how journalists and politicians ignored or obscured the impact of covid-19 on racialized or disabled people. Of the sources I cited for this book, where journalists were overwhelmingly white and able bodied, there was an even number of women and men reporters: 215 men and 216 women (though only a few nonbinary reporters). The critical mass of women reporters meant that reporting through a gendered lens was more possible than for other marginalized identities. And women are a sizable and important voting block, so politicians paid them a lot of attention. In fall 2020, under pressure from a Conservative Party that had just elected a new leader, the Liberals promised that child care would be their one major promise to Canadians, and it launched gendered issues into the spotlight. The spinoff effects of child care, the impacts of women withdrawing from the labour force and the money that a child-care system could generate circulated

through the news cycle, spun around by pundits and columnists who loved the faux word she-cession. All the while, the most needed targeted help for women never came.

Early on, it was clear the pandemic would have a variety of gendered impacts. Just as covid-19 would disproportionately impact disabled people and racialized people, it also disproportionately impacted women, though not all women equally. Through a lack of resources and emergency benefits, the poorest women — most likely to be disabled, Indigenous, Black and/or racialized — received nothing from Canada’s self-declared feminist prime minister. As Canada locked down in spring 2020, there was desperate need for support services to combat gendered violence and women’s labour participation walked off a cliff. Governments enacted some policies trying to mitigate these effects but there was nothing done that managed to cut to the core of the issues: systemic misogyny that plagues Canadian society. And at the heads of these governments were variations on a theme of Dad — men whose steady hand or quick rage became the defining characteristic of how they managed the pandemic.

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