Four Big Headlines from 2014 that weren’t Gendered and Should’ve Been: 1. The Ebola Outbreak

@GendertheNews

Welcome to my blog! My first few posts will rewind through 2014 and address several cataclysmic events that shook the world and how gendered analysis provides insight into understanding them further. The first of these is a unique case in that there was some gendered media coverage! So it seems a good place to start:

1.    The Ebola outbreak in west Africa

There was actually quite a large body of journalism on this (see: Washington Post or The Independent) but I could not do a summary of the biggest events in 2014 without mentioning Ebola. The virus has impacted most areas of the globe but much of the media attention was directed towards African states such as Sierra Leone,  Liberia and Guinea and with good reason. The Economist reports that the latest death toll is estimated at the 10,000 mark. Gendering this allows us to see that between 55-60% of these deaths have been women. (Saul, 2014, The Independent.) I would like to emphasise two central gendered points here: firstly, as much of the mainstream media suggests, women have an increased risk of Ebola due to the caring burden. Women are assumed to be the primary caregivers both in the public and private sphere. Therefore an overwhelming percentage of employed nurses and healthcare assistants are women in close contact with the virus in their daily life. Then at home, in the private sphere, women are expected to perform all care labour and unilaterally care for their sick children, regardless of the risk. This sexual division of labour extends around the globe:  the not-for-profit industry is an extremely feminised industry as a result of the perceived essential caring nature of femininity. The volunteering sector is particularly dominated by middle-class women in the west as a result of its flexible nature. Therefore, many aid workers tend to also be women travelling to diseased areas with aid. Indeed, the two cases of Ebola in both Britain and UK were female nurses returning from Sierra Leone.

Secondly, there was a distinct underlying neo-colonial tendency in the press to homogenise Africa and drum out the common rhetoric of ‘Africans’ (particularly African women and children) in desperate need of white, western men’s money to help them. This was particularly poignant in the Band Aid 2014 video in aid of funds to fight Ebola which some African musicians refused to take part in as a result of its potentially racist undertones. Africa is one of the most largely diverse continents in the whole world and deserves more than simply to be depicted as poor and diseased by the western press.

More on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo8OIbAZcRE&list=PLBAQtIf4z_FYbRQ2CYCg7Hh92LsW_KZyw&index=5