to not know what difference a female perspective would have made?

[icewoman]

Covid enquiry.

Helen McNamara, deputy cabinet secretary says women were being ignored and disregarded and the female point of view was missing from most decision making

I have no difficulty believing that our revered leaders behaved like a bunch or ignorant arrogant chauvinistic pigs but I do wonder what, if anything, a female point of view would have changed about the decision making?

Liz Truss did a remarkable job when she brought her female perspective to the top job. Plus people like Priti Patel or Dianne Abbot, they're almost universally respected for their opinions and decisions, their female perspective must have really helped.

😂

How policies would impact on children, carers, women experiencing domestic abuse in lockdown etc. Things I doubt the men in the room gave a second thought to.

Loads of women wouldn't think about those either though.

Childcare
Domestic abuse
Elderly people
Day centres for Elderly, nd and those with ld
Schools
Food poverty
Those on zero hour contracts or low wages

Well, you only need to read a sample of threads on here to see that, even in situations where there is job and pay parity, women assume a greater burden of housekeeping, childcaring and elder caring responsibilities.

So maybe, gendered though this suggestion is, a female viewpoint would have increased the focus on issues of schooling, childcare, care homes, informal family caring arrangements of all sorts, families who needed support from different agencies, the increased risk of domestic violence and parent on child violence etc etc.

Well, Helen MacNamara was probably one of the few who understood the impact of closing nurseries and schools on working mothers, and who understood which sex would really end up bearing the brunt of it all.

It was mentioned in her evidence this morning that she did school pick-ups and had her ears to the ground (paraphrasing).

Those men only looked at how policies would effect them and other upper class white men. A woman may have provided a broader view of how women, and children would be effected and possibly others in society. Wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d ignored it though

Not in my experience.

Working women were the hardest hit in covid due to having to take on childcare responsibilities whilst also working from home. They also did the majority of the home schooling. It’s predominantly women who work in the care sector, women who are mostly nurses. So yes I would say the opinions of a woman would have been appreciated.

I'm a woman: no children, not a carer, never been in a DA relationship. Plenty of men have experienced these things (even though they typically fall more to women). I think that was the point the OP was making.

Women just have a different point of view to men and tend to be more caring. Men (on the whole) compartmentalise better than women which would definitely impact on decision making.

Having a diverse range of people around a table, bringing a diverse range of perspectives and experiences, enables better, more-informed decision-making. Having a single sex group, most probably from very similar socio-economic and educational backgrounds provides a more singular perspective.

Studies have shown that having more women in the room when these sorts of decisions are made absolutely does impact many aspects that men (and here, we're faced with the extra challenge of wealthy, mostly white, middle aged men just to add to the lack of diversity).

Invisible Women discusses this at length in various chapters.

It is absolutely true that in real life, much as we would like it NOT to be true, women were the ones who were immediately thinking about the children, schooling, how food was to be bought and prepared if shop options were limited etc. Frustrating though it was, it was women who were doing the homeschooling, women whose jobs were disproportionately impacted in many ways either because they were caring for children or because they worked in roles that could not be done from home.

Also, and again, this should NOT be a gendered issue but it is... it is women who worry about the psychological impact on children, the elderly or just society at large far more than men do. You only have to spend 10 minutes listening to conversations between women in public or on here to see that while a woman is worrying about her child's mental health, how they're fitting in at school, social development etc, men simply are not in the same way.

It is disingenuous to think that women not being involved didn't make a difference. It shouldn't have made a difference, but it does.

All of this.

Pointing out that the very few women take the same view as men is actually indicative of why there needs to be more, not fewer. Women who succeed in a very male environment may do so because they take the male perspective, either by inclination or socialisation. Make half the people in the room female and it changes.

And yes, DV, caring, working, childcare and many more issues need to be addressed. Women need to be in the room.

Agree - there has to be a decent proportion of women in the room. Being 'the only woman at the table' is bloody soul-destroying. I had it for decades, both in academia and in another role.

You don't want to be typecast as 'the voice of childcare' or 'the voice of maternity leave', but none of the men seemed to know anything about it, or care about it. If I'm there as a subject specialist in (say) hydraulic engineering solutions in flood zones, that's what I want to focus on. But dear lord, someone in the room needs to point out that closing all the infant schools during inclement weather will impact on the rest of the workforce.

The main problem was they were all utterly incompetent.

They weren't all from the same background as Matt Hancock and that absolutely useless education secretary were state educated. Priti Patel was Home Secretary at the time and she is a woman of Indian heritage.

I actually worked for a company with all male directors at the time. They decided within 24 hours of one of them coming back from a flight through Heathrow at the end of February, that within a week we were all going to work remotely. The director who announced it to us was a carer for his elderly mother. (HIs elderly mother would randomly start wandering around in the background when he did calls and started talking.) They were actually willing to fight with clients who refused to provide us with the tools to work remotely and access their systems.

😂

I can't think of a single scenario or policy were a woman's input wouldn't be valuable.

What I've found working with men with caring responsibilities that they are often too scared to speak up.

The reason for it is then they are typecast like women as not putting their job first.

Saying that I've worked for companies were most people have caring responsibilities including the directors. This means they get called up by their children's schools or their children themselves when there are issues. Some of the "issues" teenage children call up about are funny though.

For me two things highlighted women were never even thought about:

1. The fact that put schools into lockdown without thinking through how children would be educated/people would work at home with children there all day
2. the fact golf clubs were the first places to reopen when lockdown lifted.

I saw the glaring misogyny at the time, am not surprised to hear this at all.

This is my observation...

When a man takes on caring responsibilities (either for children, elderly relatives or a sick relative) it is noticed.

When a woman does it, it is just expected.

Helen MacNamara and Andrew O'Connor KC are going though her evidence on lockdown & domestic violence, and PPE for women.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55890779

An example of how female input based on experience changed covid policy

I think a lot of the longer term issues would definitely have been helped by having women and just inputs from different types of people. I’m sure a lot of middle/upper class people could picture their kids at home, calmly working in a study or dining room while dad works in his study and mum supervises. They weren’t picturing abusive households or even just chaotic homes with one shared (or no) computer, kids living and working in one room, homes where the only way mum can keep the peace is to send dad off to the pub in the evening and yet now he’s here ALL THE TIME etc.
My DH was in home quarantine as he had flown back from the U.K. (we were in Aus) and the police woman who checked up on him to make sure he had stayed inside asked me quietly how things were at home and told me that their calls about domestic violence were higher than ever recorded.
Did anyone ask social workers what the implications would be of sending children home long term with their abusers? Or even ask who would be supervising the work sent home?