The Guardian reports,
“Female-led countries handled coronavirus better, study suggests”
Countries led by women had “systematically and significantly better” Covid-19 outcomes, research appears to show, locking down earlier and suffering half as many deaths on average as those led by men.
The relative early success of leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen and Finland’s Sanna Marin has so far attracted many headlines but little academic attention.
The analysis of 194 countries, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum, suggests the difference is real and “may be explained by the proactive and coordinated policy responses” adopted by female leaders.
[…]
“In almost all cases, they locked down earlier than male leaders in similar circumstances. While this may have longer-term economic implications, it has certainly helped these countries to save lives, as evidenced by the significantly lower number of deaths in these countries.”
[…]
She added that while female leaders “were risk averse with regard to lives”, locking their countries down significantly earlier than male leaders, that also suggested they were “more willing to take risks in the domain of the economy”.
Now that the Great and the Good (you can’t get much greater and gooder than the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Word Economic Forum) have officially endorsed the idea that sex based differences exist and it is OK to mention them, and that stance has been warmly endorsed by the Guardian, I look forward to reading the follow-up report on the superiority of male leaders when it comes to protecting the economy. After all, 99% of the time we are not in a pandemic and the economy is the political issue that most affects people’s lives.
Silly Natalie Solent, don’t you know that Women are just the same as men?
Except when they are better of course.
Since the pandemic isn’t yet completely over, I would suggest that drawing such conclusions is a little premature. It is possible that all that is achieved by having lockdowns is the same number of people dying but over a longer period.
The Left considers it white patriarchal hegemony to say “if yours is as good as mine, then mine is as good as yours.” Doesn’t matter what ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ refer to. (Warning: music.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0
Little attention has been paid to the fact that Jacinda Arden has postponed her country’s election on account of Covid. This is presumably OK because as a female she is “Risk averse to saving lives”.
A mere (orange) man who even joked about doing this would not have got away so lightly.
So, according to the Graun, rampant authoritarianism and deliberate economic suicide is absolutely fine so long as those actions are fueled by estrogen. Okay, got it. Or is it more of a self-identification thing? If the tyrant-in-chief and wrecker-of-the-economy identifies as a woman do they still get lauded? After all, transwomen are women. At least that’s what I’m told to believe these days. Maybe, to get the plaudits, Trump and BloJo simply need to declare themselves women, and only a bigot would dare gainsay them 😉
Not sure how that follows from the Grauniad report.
A much more serious problem with the report is that Finland did NOT lock down afaik (i.e. Wikipedia says they didn’t). It is true that they took early action. They did not lock down exactly because they took early action.
Denmark also took early action, but their lockdown was apparently much more lax than those in Italy or the UK, e.g. it was only recommended that private-sector employers allow employees to stay home.
Lots of countries with male PMs also took early action and avoided anything like a full lockdown. For instance, the country where i live.
PS: I don’t know about Germany, but presumably each state government took responsibility for its own state. How many German state governments have women leaders?
It is easy to laugh at the absurdities of the Frankfurt School of Marxism – and its demented “academic studies”.
Except that these universities do not just produce Guardian writers – they produce Corporate Managers, and the people who run “Conservative” Central Office.
I’ve said from the start that if Boris had closed our borders when it might have made a difference, in January, he’d have faced a torrent of accusations of “racism” from all quarters. So I propose an alternative theory: female darlings of the media can get away with more than male conservatives.
“Since the pandemic isn’t yet completely over, I would suggest that drawing such conclusions is a little premature.”
That too. Apparenly New Zealand is now finding cases in remote areas in which they have absolutely no idea how the patient caught the virus. I still think there’s something very important about it that we don’t yet know.
“99% of the time we are not in a pandemic”…Look for that to change, now that our ruling class has seen how well a pandemic works as a pretext for controlling the populace.
I think the study is transphobic.
Did the survey check whether the leaders identify as non-binary? If not, why not?