IN THE Government advertising campaign F.A.C.T.S., we are consistently and effectively reminded of the behaviours we need to maintain to control the virus: face coverings, avoid crowded places, clean hands, two-metre distance, self-isolate.

Each time I see it, I’ve been distracted by that poor woman with her hands in the sink, a resigned look staring at the camera.

International Woman’s Day this week has celebrated the great achievements of the most successful women, not least the brilliant female scientists who have driven the vaccination programme.

But it has also highlighted how the pandemic has disproportionately affected women across the country, in many walks of life.

It is women who have statistically been most likely to have been working in the frontline: nurses, shop workers, teachers. They have been most likely to have lost their jobs: hospitality, retail, personal care.

Many of these women are older and will have little or no chance of finding paid employment again.

On top of this, press reports reveal women have been more likely to take on the responsibility of household chores: cleaning, shopping, childcare. They are also the highest proportion of unpaid carers.

Statisticians predict fewer women will go back to the workplace full time once the economy opens, and their earning capacity will be substantially reduced.

Eighty-nine per cent of nurses in the UK are women. The offer of a one per cent increase in wages for nurses down south – there will be an ‘interim’ one per cent rise in Scotland – after all the clapping and gratitude that has been showered on them, says it all. It’s like a very rich man in a restaurant, eating and drinking the best, paying hundreds for the privilege, and leaving a pound coin under the napkin for the waitress. It happens.

The subliminal message in the advert of the middle-aged woman with her hands in the sink, to me, compounds the 20th-century attitude that women can get a ‘wee job’ if they like, but they are primarily unpaid housewives and carers.

Is this the way forward? I don’t think so. We do not want that, for ourselves or our girls.

I doubt our menfolk do either.