The human development crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic is putting the fight for gender equality at risk. The immediate effects of COVID-19 are already showing in different dimensions, from health and education to the burden of unpaid care work and gender-based violence.
While the COVID-19 crisis affects everyone, women and girls face specific additional risks due to deeply entrenched inequalities, social norms, and unequal power relations. Understanding the gender-differentiated impacts of the COVID-19 crisis through sex-disaggregated data is fundamental to designing policies that reduce vulnerabilities and strengthen women’s agency. This is not just about rectifying long-standing inequalities but also about building a more just and resilient world.
The Human Development Report Office in collaboration with the Gender Team at UNDP, presents new Dashboards on the Gender Inequality and the COVID-19 crisis with a Human Development perspective. They show how the pandemic puts women’s human development at risk and affects their crisis preparedness. It also highlights women’s ability to tackle the effects of the pandemic and associated economic crisis for themselves.
The first dashboard (Figure 1) depicts areas at risk–in health, including reproductive health, and finances. Women face multiple challenges in these areas. Women are at the frontlines of the COVID-19 response. They make up more than 85 percent of nurses, and women make up almost half of medical doctors for all groups except countries with low human development. But they are also overrepresented in many sectors most heavily impacted by national lockdowns, such as accommodation and food services, the garment industry, and retail. On top of this, women´s disproportionate representation in informal employment makes them less likely to have protection against dismissals, paid sick leave, and other worker rights if they lose their jobs.
health. The use of contraceptives was already lower than 55 percent in medium and low human development countries. In this context, the crisis is likely to increase maternal mortality and adolescent pregnancies. In low and middle-income countries, 47 million women are expected to lose regular access to modern contraceptives due to the COVID-19 pandemic if lockdowns shut family planning clinics.
