Gender-based problems need gender-based solutions

When, earlier in April this year, Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau famously tweeted about how his budget for 2021 would turn things around for women because they had been hit harder than men by the pandemic, he was met with harsh criticism.

Not that, in today’s culture, there’s anything surprising in being muted, challenged or even cancelled. In Trudeau’s case, however, the dispute had more to do with his reference to the “she-cession”, something that seemed to justify the accusations of gender discrimination.

At first, before running my own internet search and realising that the term ‘she-cession’ had been around for at least a year before this incident, I too was infuriated, but only because personally, I am against the careless manipulation of words. Then again, it’s good to remember that even ‘she-cession’ is simply the female version of the ‘man-cession’ coined during the Great Depression.

Linguistic matters aside, one of the things that struck me was a follower’s comment saying: “Oh I didn’t know COVID-19 could tell male from female.” Surely enough, as much as we know that the virus is not intelligent enough to make this distinction, we are also aware that it does...