COVID-19: Women will bear the brunt of fourth wave’s long-term effects

“Without gender balance in leadership positions, the specific needs of women may not be prioritized and women may not be included in decision-making or design of responses.” –

Dr Vandana Sharma, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

“I hope everyone realises how important a gender lens is for international studies.”

Huiyun Feng, Griffith University

“A unified and intersectional approach to health – mindful of the interconnectedness of gender, citizenship, ableness, national origin, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and wealth – is the only inclusive response to the COVID-19 pandemic that will safeguard the health and well-being of all individuals.” 

Goleen Samari, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health

“Research from Ebola outbreaks tells us that policies put in place to stop transmission of the virus (including movement restrictions, screening procedures and a reduction in available services) can lead to catastrophic delays in access to essential maternity services, putting pregnant women and their babies at risk.  We must do more to ensure that the secondary consequences of epidemics are not worse than the epidemic itself.”

Gillian McKay, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

“COVID-19 impacts heavily on men and women in different ways and it is essential that these are fully taken into account in policies and practices that are gender-responsive. For men, a key issue is their higher risk of serious COVID-19 disease and death. This is linked to their risk-taking health behaviours and excess burden of many of the underlying conditions that are associated with poorer outcomes. There is also major concern about the mental health consequences for men, particularly suicide.”

Peter Baker, Director, Global Action on Men’s Health

“Every disruption allows for a creation – COVID-19 accelerated the health literacy about sex and gender in medicine. It is now our duty to perpetuate and evolve this crucial field towards equity, inclusion and precision in medicine.”

Evelyne Yehudit Bischof (prev. Biskup), Associate Professor Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences; Research Physician, University Hospital of Basel

“Being an Advocate for Gender Equality, I aspire for a world where is gender is seen as a strength and not as a weakness in leadership. In a gender-equal world, we benefit everyone. A balanced world is a better world.”

Deepshikha Chhetri, Health & Gender Advocate and Public Policy Fellow (CPL), India, and member of Women in Global Health and Restless Development

“To achieve gender equality, first we need to understand that gender roles play a key part in defining exposure to diseases and perpetuation of stereotypes leaves women in vulnerable positions. It’s time to analyze not only COVID-19, but all diseases and other issues, with a gendered perspective.”

Elena Marbán Castro, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)

“Without a gender lens to the COVID-19 response, we risk dialing back years of hard won gains in gender-equality, including in areas of violence against women and reproductive/sexual health — and importantly missing opportunities to use this moment for systematic beneficial change.”

Amber Peterman, Department of Public Policy, UNC Chapel Hill

“COVID-19 is not a gender neutral disease. Sex and gender are important drivers of risk of mortality and response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding sex/gender differences in COVID-19 disease should not be optional but must be considered as a core component of an equitable national response to this pandemic.”

Pavitra Kotini-Shah, MD, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago

“As the world slowly emerges from this pandemic, we cannot go back to normal. If the response to COVID-19 is to be effective and not reproduce or perpetuate gender and health inequalities, it is important that gender norms, roles, and relations that influence women’s and men’s differential vulnerability are considered and addressed.”

Marianna Leite, Global Lead – Gender and Inequality, ChristianAid

“Without a sex and gendered lens, we won’t ever understand the true effects of COVID-19 on women, men, and non-binary people and nor will be able to define the right responses.”

Louise Chappell, Director, Australian Human Rights Institute

“Research evidence shows poor outcomes accrue from decision-making and policy responses that are insensitive to gender inequalities: Reduced prospects for short and medium term economic recovery, overall decline in people’s health and wellbeing, increased child poverty, domestic and family violence.”

Jacqui True, Director, Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre, School of Social Sciences, Monash University

“The emerging ‘knowledge’ on male vulnerability as a result of COVID-19 crisis perhaps alerts us to the often neglected investment in critical engagement with the ‘man question’ in gender equality conversations.”

Amon A. Mwiine, Makerere University, Uganda

“Diverse women’s and LGBTQI+ organisations must be part of monitoring and accountability mechanisms and be represented while developing gender-responsive policies in the post-COVID-19 scenario.” 

Jashodhara Dasgupta, Co-Convenor, Feminist Policy Collective, India

“It is not only about health. The pandemic impacted the learning process of men and women students in health school differently. These future health workers fall into traditional gender roles. The male students in low- and middle-income countries still actively work outside to earn money, while the females do housekeeping work at home.”

Nuzulul Putri, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia

“The COVID-19 pandemic has swiftly and radically transformed the world we live in. It is crucial to study the gendered dimension of this pandemic and intersections between gender, class and race/ethnicity. It is also crucial to follow the evolution of these intersections in time and investigate their dynamics.”

Ilana Löwy, CERMES 3, Paris.

“We can’t fix what we don’t know is broken and we don’t study what is not on our radar. Creating better health and a more just society starts by increasing neurodiversity on leadership teams so that biological sex and gender is more consistently placed on the radar.”

Jeannette Wolfe, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine UMMS-Baystate

​​”COVID-19 represents a significant threat to gender equality and highlights the urgent need to integrate gender analysis into emergency preparedness and response plans. Hence ensuring equal representation and participation of people of all genders—and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making processes before, during, and after a health emergency should not be an exception but the norm.” 

Eliane Lakam, Baltimore City Continuum of Care 

​​”Now is the time to ensure that women are not left behind as governments consider policies to move through and past COVID-19. We are advocating for and supporting research with a gender lens to allow the needs of women and other marginalised populations to be recognized and elevated.”

Lynsey Hamilton, BC Women’s Foundation

​​“Multidisciplinary collaboration is key to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as one considers the role of gender inequities and intersectionality in COVID-19 cases and fatality, as well as in the social and health impacts of the pandemic.”

Anita Raj, Center on Gender Equity and Health, University of California San Diego

“We will recover best from this pandemic if we understand how COVID-19 is impacting different populations in inequitable ways.  Gender is a major factor in differential impacts.  There is urgent need for better data on gender and COVID-19 to inform a broad range of policy responses from the local to global levels.”

Kelley Lee, Simon Fraser University

“Sex- and gender-based analysis in scientific and policy research are critical to developing equitable and effective pandemic readiness and response. As the impacts of COVID-19 emerge, researchers must evaluate the threat it poses to progress toward gender equality across all facets of global sustainable development. Women’s contributions to the COVID-19 response will be critical to its success, and past commitments to gender equality must be upheld to mitigate the potential rolling back of the hard-fought progress for women’s equal rights, visibility, and voice.”

Alexandra Solomon, Independent Researcher 

“In this moment of unprecedented crisis, health-care workers, the equipment they need to do their work and a coordinated international response have become the front line in coping with the pandemic. Nurses represent the largest occupational group in health globally, two-thirds of whom are women, and their role is fundamental to controlling this pandemic, but also exposes them to increased risk.” 

Margaret Walton-Roberts, School of International Policy and Governance, The Balsillie School of International Affairs

“No woman should be left behind in the prevention of COVID 19 pandemic.” 

Dr Choolwe Nkwemu-Jacobs, School of Public Health, University of Zambia

“Effectively responding to COVID-19 requires taking into account how constructions of masculinity are intensifying the harms caused by the crisis; from inhibiting men from looking after their own health, to heightening care work placed on women, to exacerbating gender-based violence. Challenging gender norms is vital to tackling the pandemic and creating more healthy, caring, egalitarian societies in its aftermath.”

Stephen Burrell, Durham University

“We cannot address a problem which we don’t even bother to measure.  Too often gender is not taken into account as a variable during disease outbreaks.  This not only hides a whole host of problems; it ultimately means far less effective outbreak response.”

Kelley Lee, Simon Fraser University

“It is absolutely critical to address equity, gender, sex differences, economic impacts, GBV and household burden in COVID-19. Thank you Gender and COVID-19 for the leadership! The time is now.”

Michele R. Decker, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

“As we embark on this challenging and enduring public health emergency, we are reminded to learn from past lessons and to deliver on commitments to ensure a gender-sensitive response to pandemics – a response that is informed by evidence and rooted in human rights principles.”

Dr Shirin Heidari, President, Gendro

“Disaster exposes unequal systems that propel and shape the world order. It is high time that this oppressive, structural-violence-centered approach to disaster response is dismantled. A good starting point would be the deployment of a sex and gender lens in all research pertaining to COVID-19.” 

Kirthi Jayakumar, Founder, The Gender Security Project

“Considering the persistence of and surge in gendered violence due to the quarantine around the world, how can we rethink ‘home’ and the ‘domestic’ to come to safer modes of living and engaging?”

Jelke Boesten, King’s College London

“Our team is generating vital evidence which is too often overlooked.  We are rendering the hidden visible.” 

Kelley Lee, Simon Fraser University

“In Canada and across the globe, let us value our seniors in long-term care, let us respect their health care providers. Women in Global Health Canada urges leaders to #BuildBackBetter before the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Dr. Beverly Johnson, Women in Global Health Canada

“We need to use a gender lens to understand how COVID-19 is affecting women, men, and people of other genders differently. There are differential short- and long-term health, social, and economic effects. We need to understand these effects in order to develop appropriate gender responsive pandemic preparedness and responses which meet the unique needs of everyone.”

Rosemary Morgan, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

“During the Covid-19 pandemic, 20 of 193 countries have women heads of state and only 14 countries have cabinets where half of the ministers are women. Globally, only 25 percent of representatives in national parliaments are women. Gender equality and gender representation matters. It determines the content and focus of COVID-19 emergency laws, national task force commitments, and financial support packages”.

Sara Davies, Griffith University

“COVID-19 has exposed the cracks in our public health infrastructure. The most privileged will always have the most access to the information, resources, and energy needed to tackle an outbreak in their country, community, or within their home. We need to bring our attention to the most vulnerable, often women, and meet their needs to bring this virus under control. But most importantly, we can’t forget their health needs when this is over.”

Yara M. Asi, University of Central Florida

“Pandemics magnify existing power inequalities. A gender analysis is, fundamentally, an inquiry about power. There can be no effective pandemic response without gender analysis.”

Dr Roxani Krystalli, University of St Andrews

“It’s time for a dramatic shift in who does unpaid care and domestic work, as well as in how the government supports parents and caregivers. We need men to take on their equal share of care work, and we need supportive policies for all parents and caregivers, particularly those who have been most impacted by COVID-19, including the Black community, the Latinx community, single parents, essential workers, low-income families – and those at the intersections.”

Aapta Garg, Senior Program Officer, Promundo and MenCare Co-Coordinator

“Gender, and other intersecting social factors, must be at the forefront of pandemic preparedness and response strategies to ensure that we do not widen existing gender inequities in the event of public health emergencies. As governments reorganize funding and policy structures to respond to COVID-19, we have a unique opportunity to evaluate and advocate for solutions that may actually reduce gender and other social inequities.”

Alexa Yakubovich, University of Toronto

“It’s time we break out of the echo chamber and put a stop to the silent pandemic of gender and broader inequities in health. This begins by enabling women to lead in health, including in all aspects of the COVID-19 response. The cost of inaction is immense. Without radical change we risk loosing a generation of girls and women!” 

Roopa Dhatt, Executive Director and co-Founder, Women in Global Health

“We need to use the recovery as a time to reflect on how we can continue to advance women’s rights and link it to the overall effort to make societies more just and sustainable.”

Sara Pantuliano, Chief Executive at ODI

“Addressing gender after the crisis – after the ‘immediate’ emergency – does not happen by accident.  Our research is informed by what we know, understand, and value as a society. Rapid research and rapid response should value addressing gender equality right now during this pandemic”.

Sara Davies, Griffith University

“While we may have less control over how the virus itself may differently affect people of different genders, we definitely have control over how the policies we design will differentially affect the genders.”

Karen Grepin, University of Hong Kong

“The broader economic and social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and global recession are likely to outlast immediate health effects. Donors and governments must apply a gender lens to all COVID-19 response efforts to avoid exacerbating pre-existing gender inequalities, including those in paid and unpaid work, access to financial services and markets, and overall economic well-being.”

Megan O’Donnell, Center for Global Development 

“Pandemics expose fault-lines in our societies – we are able to see what is considered important, and by default what is not. Government’s failures to understand the secondary effects of outbreak response policy on women and other marginalised groups risks the progress the world has made to gender equality in the last decades.”

Clare Wenham, London School of Economics and Political Science

“Gendered effects of COVID-19 expose the dangers of patriarchy to women and men. Care work based off socially constructed roles puts women on the front line of caring for infected individuals and this calls for a shift from these attitudes and cultures.” 

Nigel Mxolisi Landa, Centre for Gender and Cultural Studies, Great Zimbabwe University

“Covid-19 has amplified the tenuous position women have found themselves in, forcing many to navigate front line, underpaid work with homeschooling, unpaid domestic work, and volatile family relationships. There is an intangible yet significant mental health crisis silently accompanying these balancing acts women face. Without solutions that emphasize gender equity and gender equality, women will be left behind.”

Rachel Fisher Ingraham, Independent Consultant