The latest bit of feminist tosh to emerge from a female Labour MP appeared in The Independent see here. Marsha de Cordoba is MP for Battersea and reading this article makes you realise why the Labour faces electoral extinction. I was a member of the Labour Party for most of my adult life and it gives me no pleasure to write these words.
The article opens with the inflammatory headline ‘COVID has supercharged gender inequality‘ ( Marsha likes the word supercharged and uses it a lot in her article). As you might expect no data is provided to support this claim. The same slogan in different forms has been repeated elsewhere in the media. For example that COVID has set back the cause of gender equality by two generations. What these slogans have in common is a lack of supporting data – if you repeat it often enough it becomes true, seems to be the underlying thought process.
For another example of Marsha Cordoba’s hyperbole -“Now, 15 months into a crisis that poses the biggest threat to gender equality in decades, it is time for action to ensure an equal recovery“. Really? Is this true? Again, it is a great slogan but no supporting data -but that’s feminism for you. Is it really the biggest threat to gender equality in decades? What were the other threats? Or does she mean the disadvantages faced by men?
The dominant statistic is that men are 1.39 times more likely to die of COVID compared to women. This applies across all cultures and countries and dwarfs other disparities but it is a fact that is rarely repeated in the media. There have been attempts to neutralise this statistic by blaming men for their poor hygiene practices, a claim that is not supported by evidence. Furthermore, equal numbers of men and women catch COVID, it is the case fatality rate that differs. A logical response would have been to prioritise the vaccination of men. For example, if a 60-year-old man has the same chance of dying as a 70-year-old woman the vaccine rollout should have been stratified to reflect this reality. If it had been women that were more likely to die I think it likely that this would have been the response.
Marsha de Cordova repeats the commonly heard gripe that women were more likely to stay at home, during the pandemic while ‘daddy goes to the office’ without considering the reasons why. Quite simply, more women were doing jobs that could be done from home. If you drive a heavy goods vehicle, work in construction, work offshore, drive a train, or man the oil rigs, your work can not be done from home. It was not a case of ‘daddy going to the office’- those sorts of jobs are usually done by women, daddy was more likely to be doing the sorts of jobs that could not be done from home.
The article calls for men to share more of the caring in the home. That would require more women to ‘step up to the plate’ and take on physically demanding and often dangerous jobs. I predict we won’t be seeing that any time soon.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too annoyed by this kind of journalistic tripe. There is no danger of the Labour Party being elected any time soon.
toxic feminism 