Men Die; Women Most Affected

June 23rd was International Widows Day. A United Nations ‘ratified day of action’, International Widows Day—unlike International Men’s Day, which is actively ignored by the UN—acknowledges the “many women around the world” whose “devastating loss of a partner is magnified by [the] long-term fight for their basic rights and dignity.” 

While it is of course important and admirable that the needs of widows are recognised and supported by the UN, there is an elephant in the room that is conveniently ignored. The UN states that there are “more than 258 million widows around the world” with widows “historically being left unseen, unsupported, and unmeasured in our societies.” But what about the 258 million male lives lost in the creation of those widows? For every widow that cries, is there not a man that died?

It is natural that there are more widows than widowers: men tend to be older than their female partners, and many women prematurely lose their husbands due to ‘avoidable’ reasons including “armed conflict, displacement, and migration.” Hillary Clinton indeed famously said that “women have always been the primary victims of war” because women “lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.” But if women are the primary victims of war, then are they not the primary victims of the high male suicide rate; or that almost 100 per cent of workplace fatalities are men; or that men make up the majority of victims of violence including homicide?

I am not here to downplay the suffering of widows all over the world, but I would like to highlight that their suffering is based on the deaths of men. 

A concept called Gamma Bias explains how we, as a society, exaggerate the needs of women while ignoring the needs of men: a reasonable explanation for the UN’s ratification of International Widow’s Day against International Men’s Day. But while Gamma Bias may have made a lot of sense in the gender-role-centric past, nowadays this unequal application of empathy hurts not just men, but society as a whole. One would hope that the vast majority of widows wished that their late husbands were still alive. So while we are supporting the widows around the world, let's not forget about the husbands that are still alive and, of course, the widowers who often mourn in silence and without support—if the UN and wider society could put as much focus on the support of men as they do for women, all parties might benefit from men ‘sticking around’ a bit longer.