Feeling hot, irritable, sticky? Me too. Chances are, though, that if you’re a woman, you’re feeling this much more acutely than the men around you.
Part of this is to do with hormones: women feel the heat more than men (and it’s nothing to do with us being “more dramatic”). Dr Amir Khan explains that oestrogen and progesterone can affect how your body regulates temperature, and menopause and hot flushes can make that worse. Women also tend to have smaller bodies and less blood volume than men, so when heat rises, our bodies have less circulating blood available to move heat from the core to the skin, where it escapes. It takes longer.
Women also tend to have smaller hearts and narrower blood vessels, so shifting blood around the body to get rid of excess heat is less efficient. Research also suggests women often have a higher skin temperature, but a lower core temperature than men – meaning we feel hotter and more uncomfortable. Then there’s dehydration, iron deficiency, sleep (women have more sleep disruption during menopause and perimenopause)… the list goes on. But I have something else to add to this visceral list: the “mother load”.
If you are a mother or carer, let me ask you this: are your children’s schools closed this week because of the unprecedented, searing heat? And if they are (like mine are), who’s looking after them? I’d be willing to bet that it’s overwhelmingly women. Both of my children are off school for the next three days: one is out completely, while the other is finishing at midday. And, like most (if not all) of the women I know, we’re the ones staying home from work to look after them.
The majority of unforeseen childcare responsibilities fall immediately – some might even say instinctively – to women. We are so often expected to stop our working days when the school rings to report a child is unwell and needs picking up; we are usually the first on their call lists not out of choice, but assumption.
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Whenever I hear from the school medical office, the conversation always starts this way: “Hello, is that X’s mum?”
Our maternal presence is presumed when we take our kids to the dentist, the doctor, the optician and hospital appointments. I found it bewildering and disconcerting when I discovered that I’d lost my name completely when I became a parent – I found myself suddenly being addressed as “Mum” by everyone from the midwife to the local health visitor, from nursery staff to the headteacher. “But no,” I wanted to say. “I am a mother, but I’m still ‘Victoria’.” Still, mums are all too often the go-tos, the first responders, the sacrificial lambs. Which brings me back, full circle, to heatwaves.
We already know that across 37 countries covering 20 per cent of the global population, women typically undertake 75 per cent of childcare responsibilities.
We saw this play out – disproportionately and dramatically – during lockdown. We also know that the UK still has a shameful gender pay gap of (on average) £2,548 a year. At the current slow rate of progress, that gap isn’t expected to close for another 30 years – which means that if you’re a woman in the workforce, you will effectively continue working for free for the first month and a half each year, compared to men.
Now, look at the way that women are “expected” (yes, just as we are “expected” to take days off when there’s no school) to take career breaks after childbirth, the maternity and pregnancy discrimination that still exists; the woeful number of women in senior positions across the breadth of the British workforce.
I went to an awards event last night and chatted to the new Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Minister, the MP Natalie Fleet. I also spoke to Jess Phillips, her predecessor, who recently resigned from Keir Starmer’s government – partly, in protest over delays to implement proposals aimed at preventing children from taking explicit images of themselves online.
Both are brilliant politicians, yet there still hasn’t been a single female Labour leader in 126 years of the party’s history. And things are still dire in the UK for women.
So, this week, as temperatures reach record levels and the crisis becomes impossible to ignore (climate change sceptics, eat your heart out), I’d ask you to look around at who’s left picking up the slack when our schools buckle under the pressures of intense heat; and to start asking questions – at home, out in public, at work – about exactly why that is.
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