We Need to Reclaim the Term 'Gendered'

A brief rant

You’ll have to forgive the following rant as it is not directly about child-related issues, but rather about the tangential concern of ‘gendered’ problems.

Two quite different topics caught my eye this week - one being the revelation that the majority of people overdosing on paracetamol are female (including a disturbing number of girls under 16), the other being the acknowledgement that the overwhelming majority of Australia’s drowning deaths were men.

What exactly is a ‘gendered’ issue? I come across the term regularly while looking at children’s issues, rarely used according to its common-sense definition of ‘pertaining more to one gender than the other’. Instead, it is generally used in the more narrow sense of, ‘something experienced by one gender because of the other’ and I don’t need to tell you which gender is focused on as the victim, and which the perpetrator.

An example can be inferred from something I quoted from the SMH’s domestic violence campaigner once:

Intimate partner violence is the only life-threatening social issue where women are the overwhelming majority of victims. Suicide, murder, road deaths, cancer deaths, drug overdose, substance abuse, gambling addiction and incarceration all disproportionately affect men but none of those issues get a fraction of the attention [blank] give to domestic violence.

‘Blank’ in her article was ‘Men's Rights Activists’, but it works so much better if you say, ‘feminists’. Or, ‘the media’. Or, ‘politicians’. My point today? Only domestic violence is called gendered. Of all those major issues, only the one affecting women is called, ‘gendered’.

But even this unpleasantly selective and biased use of the term is undermined by the regular use of the phrase to simply mean, “this is about women”. Irrespective of who is doing what to whom, it’s a women’s issue and therefore ‘gendered’.

A particularly egregious example (to my mind) occurs in the report on contraventions to Family Court orders that I looked at briefly here. Of the many things that are found in that report, be it accusations of male violence or high rates of female recalcitrance or systemic failures or just the many many ways children are betrayed by the process, the one that is singled out as gendered is:

The study has revealed a gendered pattern in the parties who instigate litigation, both in relation to primary parenting proceedings and subsequent contravention proceedings. For both kinds of proceedings, fathers were the applicants in the majority of cases.

To elucidate - it is ‘gendered’ that fathers instigate litigation against mothers firstly to create parenting orders to see their kids, and secondly when the mothers contravene those orders.

It is not regarded as a gendered problem that fathers need to go to court to see their children in the first place. Nor is it a gendered problem that mothers contravene the parenting orders, more often than fathers and far more often than not without any reasonable excuse.

The gendered problem occurs when the narrative can be framed as the man instigating an action against the women, irrespective of it being in direct response to her previous behaviour.

None of this is particularly surprising, we have seen it all before. What is fascinating is when this narrative continues to dominate in scenarios where there is essentially only one gender. If that gender is ‘female’, it remains a gendered issue.

I was recently looking at a report from last May by the Select Committee on Birth Trauma, found HERE. In her opening remarks, the Chair says the enquiry “reflected the growing recognition of the importance of addressing this form of gendered violence.” It also includes the term, “obstetric violence” in the terms of reference, a phrase that the government’s response sensibly ignores.

How is this “gendered” violence? The various professions surrounding birthing (and the very real trauma that sometimes ensues) are all overwhelmingly female. Nurses, hospital administrators, associated health care professionals: all overwhelmingly women. Midwives - whom I playfully think of as the most sexist profession - are so female dominated that their code of practice refers to colleagues as “other women”. As for ob/gyns, a survey by the RACMA tells us that over 55% of specialists in the field are women, and 82% of trainees, so it is already female-majority and within a generation will be female dominated. The US gives us a glimpse into our future, as they have 85.2% female ob/gyns according to THIS career website.

All this leaves us with the end point that the ‘birth trauma’ being experienced by mothers, where it can be blamed on one or more of the medical profession (and not just on circumstance, or a flawed or unrealistic birthing plan) is ‘inflicted’ overwhelmingly by other women. If a woman hurts another woman, what does it even mean to use the term ‘gendered’ to describe this interaction?

Well, I reject that nonsense usage. I’m reclaiming the literal meaning of gendered. I’m taking it back.

And I’m going to ask, why aren’t mortality rates in nursing homes considered a gendered issue? More men go into nursing homes than women [source] - but there are twice as many women in nursing homes as men at any given moment, because the men tend to just die, while the women last on average for years. The gendered element? Nursing home staff are overwhelmingly female.

The quality of care these women provide can best be demonstrated by the fact that we had to have a Royal Commission into the appalling state of the aged care industry. It did not address the gendered problem of men dying at a far greater rate than women: the sole use of the term ‘gender’ in the final report summary (pg. 67) was dealing with, “people from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or intersex (LGBTI) communities”, people who (unlike men) matter to government. The 107 pages of recommendations said nothing at all about improving the treatment of men, nor about addressing the ‘lack of representation and diversity’ in the workforce, beyond demanding men and women be paid the same.

My own industry, disabilities, is similar. Predominantly female workforce, predominantly male clientele (due to many disabilities, from autism to muscular dystrophy to Klinefelters, being predominantly or exclusively male - plus the many male victims of things like stroke who are simply dumped into group homes). Again, we had to have a Royal Commission due to horrific levels of abuse. This time the Royal Commission final report had a lot to say on gender, but it was mostly variations, over and over, of saying “multiple forms of discrimination and oppression are experienced by people with disability based on their gender, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, age, LGBTIQA+ status, or other identities”: again, the folks who matter to government. When it did address abuse by gender, it was only in terms of women: e.g. pg. 138, which speaks of “violence against women, with a goal of ‘ending gender-based violence in one generation’”. That is, ‘gender-based violence’ is synonymous with ‘violence against women’, and an entire industry of majority male clients suffering at the hands of majority female staff, should only look at the minorities.

Funny, that.

What about the failing academic performance of boys in school, at the hands of an overwhelmingly female teaching profession? Now there is a problem that is gendered!

Institutional child sexual abuse? We had a Royal Commission into this, too: it showed that 64.3% of the victims were boys. Have you ever heard the problem of child sexual abuse called ‘gendered’ in a way that focuses on boys? The fact that perpetrators were overwhelmingly male was identified (pg. 18) - the fact that victims were also predominantly male was not focused on, other than vague comments about gender being a factor impacting a child’s vulnerability.

We need to take back the term gendered, because gendered problems are all around us.