When Canada
announced $3 billion in aid to Ukraine on the anniversary of its invasion by Russia in February, one item that drew some attention was a $4 million allocation for “gender-inclusive demining” in Ukraine.
“What’s woke and what’s a joke: Canada implements gender-inclusive Ukraine support,”
headlined Sky News Australia following the announcement. Fox News
matched with: “We now need diversity guidelines for clearing landmines.”
The headlines soon faded, but Canada’s foreign aid retains its tight focus on gender and women’s issues even in a country where women are more educated than men, and where it is the men who are conscripted and banned from leaving the country so they can fight the invading enemy. They often return legless, armless, blind, or mentally disabled by the horrors of battle.
Besides gender-inclusive demining, the federal government this year announced $35 million to help Ukrainian agencies and government institutions become “better able to meet the needs of Ukrainians, in particular women and vulnerable groups” plus more than $18 million to support initiatives with a focus on “gender-based violence” and other measures.
Before the February 2021 Russian invasion, when fighting was restricted to parts of the country closest to Russia,
Canadian aid to Ukraine also focused on women, with $7.9 million for “women-led agricultural value chains,” $7.8 million for skill development among “Roma women, women with disabilities, survivors of gender-based violence, women who have served prison sentences, women living with HIV, veterans, widows and internally displaced persons,” and other programs.
The war has indeed exacted a heavy toll on Ukrainian women. About
90 percent of the
6.5 million refugees who fled Ukraine were women and children, according to U.N. data. The war has brought job loss and turmoil for those women, and many suddenly became unemployed single parents, or widows, in a foreign country.
On the male side, though, almost 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured as they fight without rotation on a particularly brutal battlefield, according to reported
U.S. estimates. Most have at least temporarily left their jobs and careers, replaced in some cases by women. And men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forbidden from leaving their war-torn country.
The vast majority of the soldiers are men. Even 60 percent of civilians killed in the war so far have been male, with 12,976 men and boys wounded or killed, compared with 8,693 women and girls, according to a U.N.
report released in March. It had not yet determined the gender of 9,697 victims.
Many thousands of men are now severely disabled. And, although Ukrainians are generally highly educated, the men are less so than the women, leaving them less able to take professional jobs that accommodate physical disabilities.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only 43 percent of working-age men in Ukraine have some form of tertiary degree, compared with 56 percent of working-age women.
Canada’s donations to Ukraine fall under its Feminist International Assistance Policy, which
states that “no less than 95 percent of Canada’s bilateral international development assistance initiatives will target or integrate gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.”
And Canada is not alone in its focus on gender in Ukrainian aid, even though Ukrainians themselves don’t seem particularly focused on it: a
U.N. survey of Ukrainians aged 14 to 34 in 2022 showed only 2 percent were troubled with gender inequality.
However, the European Union, the United States, and other allies promote similar policies in Ukraine, highlighting gender struggles even as an invading army shells Ukraine’s territory.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversees civilian aid for the U.S. government, stresses gender in Ukraine on its website, promoting this quote by Ukrainian member of Parliament Mariya Ionova: “I want my great-great-grandchildren to know how selflessly my colleagues and I have been advocating for gender equality during the war.”
U.N. Women, the United Nations’ “gender equality” agency,
says “the impacts of war are uneven, with the greatest effects on women, children and people with disabilities,“ arguing that it promotes economic instability, food insecurity, sexual violence and other harms that affect women more than men. It does acknowledge the impact on men of ”the conscription requirement” but says little of death or injury when asserting women are more affected by the war than men.
A
study by global charity Plan International raises fears that the war “is exacerbating harmful gender stereotypes and reinforcing militarized perceptions of masculinity, where men and boys are increasingly seen as defenders of their country while care and domestic responsibilities fall to women and girls.”
And the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has taught a “
Gender Advisers’ Course” in Ukraine, advocated in its “2023 gender report” for “gender-sensitive responses to the war in Ukraine.”
Ukraine has received the message from its backers: the army, for example, appointed a trans woman from the United States as a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military, although the appointment didn’t last long. And the Rada, or Ukrainian Parliament, has recently passed laws banning gender stereotyping in advertisements. For its part, the Ukrainian government has created a “Cross-Sectoral Working Group on Gender Equality” and promises to devote special attention to gender issues.
Meanwhile, Canada’s shout-out to gender-neutral demining did not go un-thanked.
“We strive to increase the participation of women in mine action operators, so the support of our Canadian partners in this regard is valuable to us,” Ukrainian Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko
told the press in late April.
“Gender equality is seen as an integral part of Ukraine’s policy, which is based on the principles of integration, inclusiveness and integrity.”
