I found both disappointing and chilling the announcement by newly appointed minister of health Dr Joe Phaahla that men have been hugely underrepresented in the take-up of Covid-19 vaccinations since the start of SA's vaccination drive earlier this year.
The discrepancy is a significant one: of the 7.2-million people in SA who have received at least one dose of the vaccine, only 40% are men. That means 2.88-million men compared to 4.32-million women in the country have presented themselves for a jab. Disappointing indeed.
But what is chilling is that, given what we know about the Covid-19 gender gap, the vaccine hesitancy of men in SA represents yet another way in which men continue to endanger the lives of women in our country.
The Covid-19 gender gap represents the many and devastating ways in which the global pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on women and girls - in terms of damage to their economic and educational prospects, and to their health outcomes.
We know from the final wave of the rapid research National Income Dynamics Study - Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (Nids-Cram) that women in SA have been not only disproportionately affected by job losses during the pandemic, but they have yet to recover pre-pandemic employment levels - unlike men, whose employment and working hours returned to pre-Covid levels back in March this year.
Outdated gender norms that dictate that women must bear the burden of unpaid labour in the home - from domestic chores to child and elder care - mean that across income groups, women were expected to stay home during successive lockdowns in order to care for children either out of school or being home-schooled online. This despite the fact that women are the main breadwinners in 42% of South African households.
A UN Women report on the gendered impact of Covid-19 in East and Southern Africa identified girls as most at risk of being pulled out of school to assume childcare and education responsibilities for their younger siblings. This is pronounced in rural communities, where girls in households in which women are the primary wage earners are expected to take on the responsibilities ordinarily shouldered by their mothers.
SA's plague of violence against women is also on the increase as a consequence of the pandemic, exacerbated by the fact that women and girls have been trapped at home with their abusers, often in cramped conditions, during hard lockdowns. Men affected by job losses and facing health and financial worries have driven a surge in domestic and intimate-partner violence against women.
SA's plague of violence against women is also on the increase as a consequence of the pandemic, exacerbated by the fact that women and girls have been trapped at home with their abusers, often in cramped conditions, during hard lockdowns
Women and girls, meanwhile, have been cut off from broader social, work and school networks, where they might have been able to seek support and shelter from their abusers, reducing opportunities for them to report incidences of violence to friends, family and police.
Lastly, a 2020 data set from the Gauteng health department found that Covid-19 infection rates among the province's working-age women were disproportionately higher than among working-age men. The difference has been attributed to a number of gendered social factors, including the higher likelihood of women working in frontline health and service industry jobs, and women shouldering the majority of care for family members infected with the coronavirus.
In addition, the provincial data showed that women were getting tested at higher rates than men - 53% compared to 47%.
Given all of these gendered disparities in the impact of Covid-19, I do not believe it is hyperbolic to say that men's failure to get vaccinated is yet another of the many ways in which their choices and actions are killing women in SA. If men were getting vaccinated at a rate equal to that of women, 1.44-million more people in SA would have had at least their first jab by now. We would be that much closer to reaching population immunity, and thus closer to the return of some semblance of normalcy in our economy and our society.
One of the more striking features of the pandemic has been how it has represented a real test of community solidarity on all fronts. The effects of a failure to collaborate have been felt in every sphere of life, from the local, to the national, to the multilateral and geo-political.
Covid-19 has exposed the difference between platitudes about international solitary and the greedy reality of rich countries hoarding vaccine supplies and closing their international borders to the unvaccinated.
Likewise, at the personal level, it has shown how often individual self-interest trumps social solidarity. It is astonishing that after the devastation wreaked by this pandemic in our country, and with tens of millions of young people waiting to receive their jabs, the health minister must embark on an information campaign begging men over 35 years of age to present themselves at their local vaccination site.
The goal of reaching herd immunity is everyone's responsibility, but the failure to arrive at this milestone will continue disproportionately to affect women. The single most important action that men can take in support of women in SA this Women's Month is simply to get vaccinated.
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