A Gender and Disaster Conference

“The purpose of this conference will be to address and review progress and existing challenges in mainstreaming gender issues in disaster risk reduction. At present there is an unequal balance in how disasters affect men and women” said Ms Chadwick.

Stevie don't-dock-dogs Chadwick has found an even more burning issue to occupy her.

It stretches the imagination how these hand-wringers propose tackling this anomaly. But hang on a minute. How did they work out that males and females are unequally affected by natural disasters?

In NZ I would expect that built-up city areas would fare the worst. If anything the population balance would be tilted towards men at any given time of the day.

As men predominate in rescue operations many will experience additional exposure to risk.

Surely gender makes little difference to children who are probably the most vulnerable given their lesser physical strength and (depending on age) reasoning abilities. Oh yes. One might make the same observation about females leaving out the age dependent qualification.

Is that it? Women are disproportionately affected by natural disaster because they are weak and stupid? Anyone that dreams up this kind of BS certainly is.

Perhaps while Ms Chadwick is over in the host country she can have a word about the the cruelty of docking dog tails. To the Chinese. Yes. It'll be about as useful as anything else she does while there.