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Notes -
This tweet by UN Women.
I am still confused as to whether this tweet is a sincere sentiment felt by someone somewhere or an A/B tested string designed to be maximally infuriating/alienating to the largest number of people.
Here is my dissection as to why this tweet is especially infuriating.
No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.
(Probably intentionally) misleading the usage of a ratio instead of a percentage. A percentage is a meaningful statistic when comparing a rate change of something. If x journalists were killed in t year, and x+a journalists were killed in t+1 year, you could say that the "more journalists were killed, a increase of b %"
Instead have a look at the numbers.
2020: 62 journalists killed (58 men, 4 women).
2021: 55 journalists killed (49 men, 6 women).
This is textbook 101, lying with statistics. Less JOURNALISTS were killed. Unless you don't care if male journalists are killed. Bonus: They calculated the percentages wrong (: - They rounded down so.. thanks for the fig leaf?
No regard for as to whether this change is "statistically significant" (FYI, well within less than 1 stddev).
Just goes without saying, the tone-deafness of it. Why not "ππππ πππππππππ πππππππππππ"?
The childish assumption that people who LITERALLY KILL JOURNALISTS will be swayed in any way whatsoever even with a LOUD proclamation of "Don't do bad thing!".
Now jaded you might say "but this is the CW, this is what always happens and will continue to happen". I agree.
In the landscape of twitter/msm only the most ragebait of headlines grab any attention, however I would say that a lot of that ragebait can be just made by applying the principles of making the best clickbait, and they might occur to someone with a certain creative bent naturally.
This tweet on the other hand isn't mere creative distortion. It has all the trappings of being intentionally crafted. Think of it this way. Someone had to go through the statistics of various professions deaths by gender, probably something like;
SELECT occupation FROM occupational_deaths WHERE 2021 > 2020 AND gender LIKE 'Female' GROUPBY occupation;and "journalist' was the only field that returned.
That is just especially hilarious to me.. The best trolls of our generation might not be 4channers but instead working for various corporate activist organizations.
That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:
Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.
On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into βkilling zombiesβ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game PokΓ©mon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.
Yep, beat me to it. The UN has a history of gender-discriminatory policy favouring women, and justifying these policies with sophistry and extremely flimsy arguments. In Haiti, the UN's justification for distributing the food to women was to claim (without a shred of evidence) that women were more likely to distribute food equitably, and also that most men had women who would give the food to them. Here's a CNN article reporting on it and laying out some of the UN's justifications.
For my part, I would say it's incoherent to justify this policy with the idea that most men have women who will distribute the food to them, since it's not as if women don't also have men who will distribute food to them too - it can be used to justify it both ways. I for one also think it would have been infinitely better if they distributed the food equitably themselves instead of crossing their fingers and hoping the women would do it for them - maybe they should consider completing their job instead of only doing half of it. But it's mainly covered in a positive manner, with the gender discrimination brushed over as an afterthought or even justified. Even the CNN article approaches it from that angle, despite indications that there were men who were excluded from necessary aid (quoting one who stated "What about me? I didn't get anything. I need food. ... Many people could not participate", completely in contrast to the UN's lip-service claims that they would try to make sure no one in need was excluded).
Additionally, as this blog post from the same author notes, a lot of their already tenuous justifications for women-only food aid in Haiti might have actually been even more questionable in the context of that specific disaster because "due to the timing of the earthquake at 4:53 pm, a high percentage of casualties were women who remained in the household, while men and children were at work or in school, leaving a high percentage of single-male headed households and households with only one, or no remaining breadwinner."
Other mental gymnastics that the UN offered up to justify their actions in Haiti was to claim (again without any substantiation) that women were being pushed out of food lines, but even if we are to charitably interpret the UN and the WFP's statements and assume women being pushed out of line was actually a problem instead of a rationalisation created by an organisation desperately trying to justify their actions, they could've solved this by establishing different food distribution centres for men and for women instead of prioritising women, thus reducing clashes between men and women through sex-segregation while creating no such gender discrimination against men when it came to their food distribution. This is such an easy solution it's hard to imagine them not thinking of it unless all their staff and policy-makers are mentally challenged, and so this is not a satisfactory justification or explanation for the policy.
Rather, I think this is a blatant example of the UN's gender ideology bleeding into their aid programmes. Placing food in the hands of women is part of their attempts to Empower Women. In this 2001 discussion here they talk about the prospect of utilising humanitarian crises to push their gender agenda - and in it, specifically targeting women for the distribution of resources is touched on as one of the possible methods for "empowerment". The concept of using disasters to promote a gender agenda has existed in the UN for a very long time, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2014 Ebola outbreak were just the instances which the mainstream reported on.
EDIT: clarity
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