Each evening when health experts update Italians in televised briefings about their nation’s COVID-19 outbreak, the lineup of authoritative figures only includes one woman: the sign-language interpreter.
Moreover, not a single woman was among the 20-member commission appointed to advise the government on how and when Italy can safely reopen factories, stores, schools and parks — a disparity all the more glaring because more than half the nation’s doctors and three-quarters of its nurses are women, many on the front lines of the pandemic.
The three researchers who isolated the coronavirus in the first days of Italy’s outbreak were also women.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Indignation over the gender inequality has exploded into the open, with about 70 female researchers and scientists signing a petition demanding that the government include women in virus decisionmaking bodies as a matter of “democracy and civilization.”
Backing them is a grassroots movement on social media dubbed “give us voice” — a riff on the token presence of the silent female sign-language interpreter at the news conferences.
A motion has also been lodged in the Italian Senate by 16 female lawmakers, calling on the government to remedy the imbalance.
Dozens of women in parliament’s lower Chamber of Deputies backed a similar motion, behind slogans such as: “Let’s make ourselves heard.”
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte this week acknowledged the appeals, calling on the head of the commission of scientific and technical experts advising the government on reopening to enlist women into its ranks.
He urged his Cabinet ministers to “keep gender equilibrium in mind” in setting up task forces.
However, Italian women’s concerns are looking beyond pandemic panels. Women are worried that the closure of schools until at least September, coupled with cultural attitudes stacked in favor of men, will set them even farther behind in the workforce.
When Conte explained to the public how the nation would gradually emerge from lockdown, “he never said the words, ‘family, children, school,’ until a journalist asked him,” said Irene Fellin, a senior researcher on gender and security at the International Affairs Institute, a Rome-based think tank.
“If couples have to decide who goes back to work when they reopen the offices, it will be the women who won’t go back,” since many women work part-time or are paid less than men, Fellin said.
As to why women were snubbed for visible roles during the pandemic, Fellin pointed to the nation’s centuries-old culture that attributes authoritativeness to men.
“I don’t think that they think women aren’t competent. They just don’t see them,” she said.
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