The impacts of COVID-19 from a gender perspective

Well before COVID-19, the WHO was warning about the importance of gender, and gender inequalities in determining  access to healthcare^[1]. Thus, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), states that the right to health depends on the principles of non-discrimination, equity and equality, and the application of a gender perspective^[2]. Nevertheless, during crises, inequalities grow, and it is clear that access to primary healthcare for women and girls continues to be a crucial issue.

How the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted and accelerated ‘gender’ issues

The COVID-19 epidemic has highlighted an issue that all humanitarian workers and aid organisations are familiar with: during crises, violence against women, and gender-based violence, increase, while protection services and healthcare systems become weaker, or sometimes even break down completely. In countries where crises lead to the collapse of local systems, more than 70% of women and girls are victims of violence[3]. Meanwhile, funding and response plans are inadequate. For example, in 2016, 2017 and 2018, funding for the response to gender-based violence represented less than 0.15% of humanitarian funding as a whole, which has no chance of obtaining a significant result. Since the beginning of the pandemic, due to lockdowns, isolation and the extreme vulnerability of women and gender minorities, there has been an increase in femicide, violence and people going missing, as well as the number of women, children and LGBTQI+ persons who have been victims of human trafficking and violent prostitution networks. In Peru, for example, more than a thousand women are still missing following the lockdown. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, one woman went missing every three hours between 16 March and 30 June[4].

Sexual and reproductive health programmes are essential for women and girls, whether in terms of their health, their rights, their needs or their wellbeing. If, everywhere in the world, we focus solely on the health response and divert essential resources that are usually allocated to these services, this could result in increased mortality among girls and women, and increased infant mortality, as well as a rise in early pregnancy rates among adolescents, in HIV infections and in sexually-transmitted diseases. It is therefore essential that humanitarian organisations include a gender approach in their response to this crisis to ensure that there is equal access to healthcare, and also that they supply gender-specific contextual analysis. The humanitarian response should be analysed not only from a medical and health point of view, but also from feminist, social, political, economic and ethical points of view.

Recently, the humanitarian community has made significant efforts to integrate gender issues into its programmes. Indeed, a significant number of framework documents and ‘gender’ policies have been developed, even though their implementation by all humanitarian actors remains a challenge. A variety of internationally accepted and recognised directives have also been produced and should be used as reference tools[5] for designing and implementing humanitarian projects during the response to a crisis. It is important that all the organisations contributing to the COVID-19 response respect all these standards in order to integrate the cross-cutting issue of gender into their projects.

In addition to gender-based violence, the current health crisis has highlighted all the other discriminations related to gender that are less visible, and are integrated and normalised by current society, such as economic, social and political inequality, and in terms of access to social protection, paid work, legal rights, etc. More broadly, rights that are normally guaranteed and legally recognised by certain countries – such as abortion rights in France – are being compromised by the closure of the relevant services at this time. Still in France, associations have demanded that the legal time limit for an abortion should be extended to compensate for the lack of access to treatment. There is a real danger that social gains could be lost. This is a risk that affects women all the more in times of crisis, as we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the beginning of the health crisis, the United Nations did launch a gendered action plan[6], underlining the measures to be taken in order to mitigate the overall impact of the pandemic on gender inequality. The UN Secretary-General warned that “COVID-19 could reverse the limited but important progress that has been made on gender equality and women’s rights.” The only possible response among the mitigation proposals drawn up by the UN authorities was to call on governments to place women and girls at the centre of their recovery plans, in all domains and sectors of activity. It clearly became apparent that women were the most exposed to the virus: nursing auxiliaries, nurses, cashiers, seamstresses, cleaners, carers, etc. The crisis has therefore brought back the fundamental issue of how we approach ‘care’ activities, which are vital, and yet are continually undervalued, invisible, badly paid or not paid, and often assigned to racialised women.

All over the world, patriarchal and discriminatory laws and social norms are omnipresent, which explains why women are perpetually under-represented at all levels of political power. As Christiane Taubira, the former French Minister of Justice, explains, “What holds society together is, above all, a group of women. If we look at the figures, for the same work, women are paid 24% less than men on average, women represent 2/3 of the illiterate adults in the world, 153 countries have laws that encourage economic discrimination against women, and last but not least, a third of all women are victims of violence at some point of their lives”[7]. And yet, these gender inequalities and their economic and social consequences begin at a very young age, with lack of access to education. With the majority of the world’s population locked down because of the COVID-19 crisis, schools have been closed in 188 countries, which will further heighten inequalities between the sexes and undoubtedly create new ones. As a result, allowing young girls to continue their schooling is a priority for many NGOs, over and above a purely health-based response.

It would be completely inaccurate to say that increased vulnerability related to gender is solely the result of the recent pandemic. Rather, it is linked to a pre-existing condition: the deep, socially-rooted inequality between women and men. The pandemic is naturally and systematically exacerbating the violence of the patriarchal system, with its exploitation of the invisible work done by women, its exclusion of gender minorities, and its marginalisation of the poor.

Learning lessons from this crisis, including within humanitarian organisations…

In my opinion, one aspect of the current crisis is not being given sufficient attention. It is important to remember that we are going through an ecological crisis, and it is abundantly clear that the spreading of the virus, globalisation and the destruction of our ecosystem are linked. There is scientific consensus that human activities have modified the climate and seriously degraded both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, making the earth uninhabitable for a large number of species. At the same time, the number of climatic refugees is constantly growing, pauperisation is getting worse, women are exploited and abused, and minority communities are targeted. More than ever before, it is time to establish the links between these phenomena, to understand the interconnections, evaluate the systemic risks and to work on intersectionality. The health crisis has shown us very clearly the limits of a capitalist, productivist, individualistic system, based on the endless exploitation of resources.

There have been many calls for change since the COVID-19 crisis, a groundswell focused on what some are already calling ‘the post-COVID world’. Many have begun to imagine what this world could be like, but the reality of the ‘pre-COVID world’ is still very present. The question remains: will the post-crisis narrative be written with women? With minorities, LGBTQIA+s, undocumented migrants, or regular migrants? Because these voices need to be heard so that a fairer, more equitable and sustainable world emerges[8]. There is an urgent need to start building a world that does not destroy humans, or the nature in which they live, to completely rethink the sexual and racialised division of work, and to fight the subjugation of women, minorities and the living world. A radical critique of the oppressive structure of society needs to be developed rapidly if we want to free ourselves from it.

The same observation applies to humanitarian organisations who are nevertheless in the front line with regard to these inequalities. During this pandemic, and notably during the first mass lockdown at the global level, a lot of webinars showed the connection between the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and the existing gender dynamics in our organisations, making parallels with the mechanisms of domination reproduced by the aid sector. It is therefore urgent for female humanitarian workers that the sector tackles gender dynamics in the field and at headquarters by promoting a non-gendered, non-racialised and non-colonialist approach. The idea of ‘power’ should be called into question by NGOs, by identifying needs related to gender, minorities and inclusion, and more specifically how these issues and the people concerned are taken into account in the decision-making process. For example, it is important to understand that staff want governance that is horizontal, equal and sociocratic in nature. These are all subjects that the sector tends to put to one side, perhaps because they are subjects that force us to be introspective, calling into question our intervention logic, and also our organisational identity, our ‘DNA’.

These different observations show that a decolonial and feminist critique is essential in order to build a new humanitarian approach. What we need to do now is to create shared governance movements, where we remove ourselves from hierarchy, invent a new form of co-existence and mutual support by stepping out of the binary visions of North and South, and imagine new narratives together that will allow new models to emerge.

[1] WHO, Gender and Health: https://www.who.int/fr/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ gender

[2] United Nations, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966

[3] https://www.unwomen.org/en

[4] https://www.lemonde.fr/big-browser/article/2020/07/28/pendant-le-confinement-au-perou-toutes-les-trois-heures-une-femme-disparaissait_6047532_4832693.html

[5] https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/system/files/2018-iasc_gender_handbook_for_humanitarian_action_eng_0.pdf

https://ec.europa.eu/echo/files/policies/sectoral/gender_thematic_policy_document_eng.pdf

https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/iasc-training

[6] https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2020/policy-brief-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-women-en.pdf?la=en&vs=1406

[7] https://www.oxfamfrance.org/inegalites-et-justice-fiscale/comprendre-et-combattre-inegalites-femmes-hommes/

[8] https://www.un.org/fr/%C3%A9quipe-de-communication-de-la-riposte-de-l%E2%80%99onu-au-covid-19/in%C3%A9galit%C3%A9s-de-genre-et-covid-19-les