Women and COVID-19: A Gender Perspective on the Socio-Economic Crisis and the Opportunities for Change

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis with broad socioeconomic implications. Crises usually exacerbate entrenched inequality between men and women. The pandemic is not an exception to the rule. To frame it metaphorically, when the pandemic forced everyone to put on the N-95 masks, it tore off the ‘mask of equality’ western societies had been wearing. With the coming off of the mask, came off the image the societies had portrayed of themselves, as societies whose citizens enjoyed gender equality in general, and economic gender equality more specifically. The pandemic exposed a reality of gender-based poverty that has grown worse as the crisis wore on: of women staying at home and trying to balance running the household, looking after their children, as well as their professional work; and of women, including pregnant women, being the first to be laid off and the last to return to work. The increased socio-economic harm to women during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be ignored, and this reckoning comes with a growing understanding that what has been happening under the guise of the pandemic runs much deeper. The focus is on two key factors that contribute to gender-based poverty: Inequality in the labour market, including the gender pay gap, and invisible work, primarily in the home and with the family. This paper proposes to lay down a path towards solutions for those problems, primarily through a demand for adequate representation of women in decision-making processes and a requirement to receive gender-specific data and gender analysis of the socio-economic solutions for the crisis. The paper presents on Israel as a test case, but both the figures and the solutions apply, with the necessary adaptations, to many countries facing the crisis aftermath.