Pandemics: A gendered crisis — The IWI: International Women’s Initiative
From 2008–2010 influenza attacked pregnant women more than anybody else. In 2019, the Ebola crisis reached its zenith in West and Central Africa. Out of 700 cases in the DRC, two-thirds were women ( World Health Organisation).
While there are a multitude of different reasons to consider pandemics to be a gendered crisis, the following are particularly relevant:
- Men and women have different behaviours when it comes to hygiene and access to pharmaceuticals.
- Gender imbalances in society mean that women are often more vulnerable than men to disease (For example: pregnancy, child marriages, period poverty and the gender pay gap).
- The spaces that men and women inhabit are different (men are usually away from home, which means they have a higher risk of bringing infection back to the household space which is traditionally female).
Since December 2019, and at the time of writing this article, the Coronavirus or COVID-19 (CO = corona, VI = virus, D = December, 19 = 2019) has killed 83,110 people worldwide. The mortality rate is currently 3.4% — 4.7% for men and 2.8% for women (confirmed cases). 309,113 people have recovered from the virus.
According to a publication in The Lancet, there is a gap between public health efforts and gender analysis that must be addressed. Despite the apparent difference in mortality rates between men and women with COVID-19, pandemics should be seen through a gendered lens.
Kristina Wintermeier, Plan International Programme Specialist Gender in Emergencies, said: “What we know from the Ebola outbreak is that women were disproportionately affected by the social and economic impacts of the disease.”
The COVID-19 crisis is neither a female or a male problem. As the past weeks have shown us, it is a global problem that affects communities, countries, and the marginalised in very different ways. Yet understanding how it can affect men and women differently is part of the solution.
CARE International states that issues caused by pandemics should be addressed as gendered because they are “social norm” issues. In this situation, “social norm” means that women could — in some contexts — have less access to healthcare, and less priority when it comes to access to treatment.
Despite COVID-19 being an international enemy, pandemics are rarely viewed through individual experiences. For women, these experiences are instrumental in educating governments about how best to cope with the growing crisis and altering public health interventions in a calculated way.
I’ve talked to women across the world to gauge what the sentiment is for individuals when dealing with different aspects of COVID-19.
The frontline: 70% of health workers are female
Victorine van Hoeck works in a nursing home in the Netherlands. Most of her colleagues are female. Globally, 70% of health workers are female. These health workers are on the frontlines of COVID-19 protection, this puts women at a higher risk.
Plan International’s Kristina Wintermeier said: “We will need to monitor if the number of female healthcare workers puts them at disproportionate risk of contracting the virus.”
“Regardless, it is important to safeguard the workforce in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19’” said Van Hoeck, she is in contact with COVID-19 every single day.
“I know I am a major risk if I were to take home the virus to my family. So I have to be responsible and be an example to others.” — Victorine van Hoeck, Nursing home nurse
Van Hoeck continues to suggest that we should all “keep our distances, with no unnecessary interactions”.
Economic Uncertainty: Female migrant workers
Wendel Bustillo’s mother is a Filipino domestic migrant who works in Hong Kong. To his surprise, his mother was sent back to the Philippines on March 10.
“She was put in quarantine for 14 days and doesn’t know when she’ll go back to work,” said Bustillo.
His mother hasn’t been paid since March 10. According to the International Labor Organisation, half of the total population of migrants worldwide are women. This is sometimes referred to as the “feminisation of migration”. In the Philippines, Filipino migrant workers send money home to the Philippines. This money accounts for around 8–10% of the country’s total GDP.
COVID-19 will not only have an impact on the Philippines’ economy but will also cause serious problems for those individual families who rely on remittances from female family members as regular income.
Bustillo comes from a small village. He was able to go to school primarily through outside scholarships. He has four siblings who rely on their mother’s pay for their own education. Now, however, Bustillo’s mother’s employment is uncertain. Sent into quarantine without any pay or promise of future employment, she represents a group of women with similar economic uncertainties during COVID-19.
Globally, women work disproportionately in insecure labour (UN women). This is the case for many Filipinos, whose work abroad has been abruptly halted due to travel bans in southeast Asian countries. The COVID-19 crisis is causing volatile marketplaces and putting many people out of work. Female migrant workers are a target.
Self-Isolation and quarantine
“I have to juggle homeschooling with work with taking care of my baby…Day 4 of the pandemic and I’m already exhausted,” laments a mother of three early on in lockdown.
For many parents, this will resonate. “I feel like I have five jobs” quotes the New York Times about Moms during this time.
Halfway across the world from the Bustillo family is Lucie Garcia, a French national living in Amsterdam. For Garcia, quarantine means that her partner can take over some caregiving responsibilities denied to him with his five weeks of paternity leave versus her sixteen.
But it’s not all family picnics and shared responsibilities, “being on maternity leave is a beautiful journey, but it also comes with some loneliness,” she says. “I was looking forward to being social and sporty again.” Garcia’s maternity leave would have ended a few weeks ago, had the Netherlands not been on lockdown.
Since mid-March, COVID-19 has forced all European governments to issue lockdowns, quarantines, or self-isolation to keep the infection from spreading. For many people, staying at home poses many challenges.
Many mothers around the world are primary caregivers in the family, which means quarantine will place more and more pressure on women to take care of their children and family at the same time. Working from home will be another requirement that mothers will have to tackle, along with their added household responsibilities.
“Working from home I now have several jobs, rather than just the one.” — Mother of three.
Women are often subject to increased emotional, physical, and socioeconomic pressure to protect their families as well as being put at higher risk of infection. These gendered inconsistencies could be seen during the Ebola crisis, which accounted for around 11,000 deaths of which 58% were women. And again, during the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti, women became the primary caregivers, meaning they were in charge of disease prevention in the household.
Along with this, from what we know about the Ebola crisis, the most harmful risk for women and girls is sexual and gender-based violence during self-isolation/quarantine. For COVID-19, isolation also poses the risk of domestic violence and should be clearly addressed so that proper measures can be taken to help those at risk.
Conclusion
Women need to be viewed as a separate segment in society when it comes to addressing COVID-19. If governments are able to assess the nuanced impact of COVID-19 on different communities, genders, and individuals, interventions will become more efficient.
It is important to understand the greater risks and exposure of women in quarantined homes with increased pressure to handle multiple jobs within their traditional sphere of influence. As well as the real and increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence during self-isolation/quarantine. We’ve seen these issues heightened during other pandemics
Governments should also specifically keep health workers and other groups with an increased risk of personal or economic impact at the forefront of policymaking when it comes to assessing and responding to the risk of infection.
Originally published at https://www.theiwi.org on April 8, 2020.
