Women are overwhelmingly on the pandemic's frontlines. But in Italy, when it comes to engineering an exit from lockdown, they’ve had a hard time getting heard.
To her, a major blind spot of the current recovery plan is the uncertainty surrounding kids’ futures. Despite teachers’ best efforts, their education has been seriously interrupted.
The government also needs to more clearly understand the link between the reopening of schools for kids and the ability of their parents to get back to work, according to Serio. “I would have recommended using the university laboratories to do mass swab testing and make serological kits for the population, because testing is essential,” she said. “Our laboratories were never called on.”
“We need to rethink the social model in which we live,” she added. “It takes courage to unhinge cultural assumptions, and courage is often a woman’s virtue.”Emanuela Girardi became one of the main promoters of the “Dateci Voce” initiative when she realized the government would not notice the absence of women’s perspectives unless it was confronted with its own biases.
Italy needs to be making it possible for women to work outside the home, she said. Those in power have to understand that “gender equality makes sense, it increases the GDP of the country and contributes to the development of the economy.” She said she would have pushed the issue of lacking personal protective equipment in hospitals, advised against clogging emergency rooms and emphasized the need for more “at home” diagnostic tools. Having a team of people equipped to carry out tests outside hospitals and advise people on self-isolating would undoubtedly have saved lives, she added.
When the number of hospital cases appeared to have decreased, the government called it good news, ignoring the fact that the numbers had fallen because hospitals were full and they no longer took in patients — meaning COVID-19 sufferers were left at home, sometimes in critical condition. The government’s failure to do so puts people like Stefania “in a risky position, both for ourselves and our families,” she said.
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