COP26 and Dodgy Feminist Statistics

The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves. Joan Didion, ‘The Womens Movement’

It had to come, it was only a matter of time before gender activists put their stamp on the COP26 proceedings. As you might expect, Gender Day at COP26 only looked at the impact of climate change on women and girls there was no mention of the other 49% of the population.

The image above originated from the meeting and was widely reproduced in the mainstream media. For example, see this article from the Independent that frames global warming as a consequence of toxic masculinity here.

That figure of 80% of people displaced by global warming would be women and children, puzzled me. Had somebody studied the impacts of rising sea levels on remote coral atolls in the Pacific according to gender? Correct me if I am wrong, but I could find no evidence from any academic source.

Here is how the figure was arrived at. Take an average-sized nuclear family of five members including a mother, father and three children. If an entire family is displaced and you lump the children together with the mother rather than the father you get a figure of 80% of people displaced are women and children. On the other hand, you could lump the children together with the father and say 80% of displaced people are men and children. Nobody would do that would they?

In short, the 80% figure tells us nothing about possible differential impacts of global warming. It reminds me of how, in the UK, the violence against women and girls (VAWG) figures were distorted by including violence against boys under that heading (see here).

We shouldn’t be too surprised about these misleading statistics emerging from the United Nations (UN). The UN has a reputation for being highly gynocentric and, in my opinion, it has undergone a form of ideological capture. James Nuzzo, in December 2020, published an intriguing study (here) showing that all the sustainable development goals that relate to gender are directed towards women and girls. Similarly, the UN has 69 Twitter accounts related to women and girl’s issues and none relating to men and boys. Looking at gender-specific words in UN documents, women and girls featured in the titles of 12,117 and male terms in 769 documents. See also blog post of Jan 2021 WHO and UN – misandrist?