Gender and the UN Women COVID-19 Response

"COVID-19 provides us with an opportunity for radical, positive action to redress long-standing inequalities in multiple areas of women's lives. There is scope for not just endurance, but recovery and growth." - Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director

Crisis management or emergency situations such as COVID-19 impact on women and men differently, with possibly serious implications if gender dimensions are not considered. UN Women is stressing in its communications the need to pay attention to women's specific needs and their contributions to the COVID-19 response. For example:

• Globally, women make up 70% of workers in the health and social sector, and they do 3 times as much unpaid care work at home as men.
• The majority of women work in the informal economy, where health insurance is likely to be non-existent or inadequate, and income is not secure.
• When health services are overstretched, women's access to pre- and post-natal health care and contraceptives dwindle.
• When households are placed under strain and in contexts of family violence, as strategies for self-isolation and quarantine are employed, the risk of gender-based violence (GBV) tends to increase.
• Relatedly, the economic impact of the pandemic can create additional barriers to leave a violent domestic situation and create higher risks of sexual exploitation.
• The outbreak has led to an increase in stigma, xenophobia, and discrimination related to race, gender, and immigration status, which can drive people away from the services they need.

To support women's leadership and advocacy in the wake of this crisis, UN Women has issued a set of recommendations:

• Ensure availability of sex-disaggregated data, including on differing rates of infection, differential economic impacts, differential care burden, and incidence of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
• Embed gender dimensions and gender experts within response plans and budget resources to build gender expertise into response teams.
• Provide priority support to women on the frontlines of the response, for instance, by improving access to women-friendly personal protective equipment (PPE) and menstrual hygiene products for healthcare workers and caregivers.
• Ensure equal voice for women in decision making in the response and long-term impact planning.
• Tailor public health messages  to reach women, including those most marginalised.
• Develop mitigation strategies that specifically target the economic impact of the outbreak on women and build women's resilience.
• Protect essential health services for women and girls, including sexual and reproductive health services.
• Prioritise services for prevention and response to GBV in communities affected by COVID-19.

In addition, UN Women's office for the Americas and the Caribbean and the Asia-Pacific Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) Working Group, of which UN Women is a part, have produced advocacy briefs of their own. Both of these resources outline COVID-19 gender impacts and offer recommendations. A few examples from each document that add to what is above follow.

Available in English, French, and Spanish, the 3-page brief "COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean: How to Incorporate Women and Gender Equality in the Management of the Crisis Response" details the different impacts and implications of COVID-19 for men and women, and it offers 14 recommendations meant to guide decision makers in integrating a gender perspective as the key for an effective response. A few of these recommendations include:

• Increase direct consultations with women's organisations, ensuring their opinions, interests, contributions, and proposals are incorporated into the response.
• Promote policy measures that recognise, reduce, and redistribute the overload of unpaid work taking place at home, which is taken on mostly by women.
• Adopt measures that ensure access of migrant women and refugees to health services, employment, and food to mitigate protection risks, with particular attention to GBV, trafficking of women and girls, and the promotion of social cohesion.
• Ensure continuity of essential services to respond to violence against women and girls, and increase support for specialised women's organisations to provide support services at the local and provincial levels.

The GiHA document COVID-19 Outbreak and Gender: Key Advocacy Points from Asia and the Pacific [PDF, 2 pages], notes, in part:

• Women play a major role as conduits of information in their communities. They have typically less access to information than men. Thus, tackling the spread of the disease should involve providing women with information about how to prevent and respond to the epidemic in ways they can understand.
• The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) has observed that "Lockdowns, quarantines and other such measures to contain and combat the spread of COVID-19 should always be carried out in strict accordance with human rights standards and in a way that is necessary and proportionate to the evaluated risk - but even when they are, they may have serious repercussions on people's lives." GiHA urges that human/women's rights need to be central to the response.
• Health workers who are part of an outbreak response need basic skills to respond to disclosures of GBV that could be associated with or exacerbated by the epidemic in a compassionate and non-judgmental manner. They also need to know to whom they can make referrals for further care or bring in to treatment centres to provide care on the spot. Furthermore, holistic support to women first responders should include psychosocial support. (Relatedly, GiHA stresses that being affected, whether directly or indirectly, by an outbreak of an infectious disease can be traumatic for those who are also GBV survivors; psychosocial support should be made be available and accessible for women and girls.)