Gender blindness during Covid

Context:  Women have been equally affected by the pandemic, but media focus bore a male face

Issue of gender blindness during COVID:

• Media’s default mode is male: This has led to a norm of normalisation of trivialisation and invisibilisation of women has become a norm
  • For E.g. Experiences of menstruating women, sexually harassed women, pregnant women among those who were migrating were ignored
  • There were women among the 80 officially declared deaths on Shramik trains!
  • The internalisation of patriarchal understanding has proved the broader aspects of domestic violence – marital rape and forced pregnancies, as elusive.
    • Poorer women often resorted to pencils and sticks to abort unwanted pregnancies.
  • Institutional conformism: Media blindness leads to policy blindness.
    • Women migrant workers,(often remaining outside official data) could not benefit from government schemes like the Garib Kalyan Rozgar Yojana.
  • Economic apathy:
    • Women were 9.5 percentage points less likely than men to be employed. (in August 2020)
    • In June, ASHA workers went on strike in Bengaluru for withheld salaries.
  • The normalisation of Gender violence: Police routinely fail to register cases of domestic violence because they do not see the criminality of wife-beating, dismissing it as mere misunderstandings.
  • Considering women as heterogeneous social category: Gendered reporting tends to focus on the upper caste, upper class/middle-class woman.

Conclusion: As a result of the gender blindness, we are left poorer in making the right policies to help India cope better with the crisis.