A COVID-19 Feminist Recovery Plan to Achieve Substantive Gender Equality

By the Center for Women’s Global Leadership staff, directed by Radhika Balakrishnan, in consultation with global experts

The far-reaching consequences of COVID-19 on local, national, and global economies have yet to be fully realized but the pandemic has clearly exacerbated existing sex, gender, and other inequalities. There has been a global surge in cases of domestic violence and an exponential increase in the burden of women’s care and domestic work, both paid an unpaid, which enables the continuation of daily life. Of equal concern are the pre-existing gaps in social and legal protections which are inherently discriminatory and increase women’s risk of gender-based violence (GBV) and which many have described as a “shadow pandemic” no less deadly than COVID-19 itself.

Women, who make up more than half of the world’s population, have suffered more harm as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis2 and many important gains made by women in recent decades are in the process of being rolled-back. Overall, women have lost paid jobs and earnings in disproportionate numbers but women’s overrepresentation amongst essential workers has led to an increase in paid work hours in the informal economy, absent the necessary social and legal protections, along with significant health-related risks. The lack of equal representation of women in the policy arena accompanied by their lack of control over public resources does not bode well for a just and sustainable COVID-19 recovery.

Macroeconomic policy choices affect women and men differently because of their different positions in the economy, both market (paid) and non-market (unpaid) work.3 Discriminatory sex and gender-based stereotypes are embodied and reproduced in the policy frameworks that determine how women and men are positioned in the economy and whose contributions count. Additional stereotyping and exclusion based on grounds such as race, ethnicity, age, health status, pregnancy, migration status, disability, and sexual orientation, among others, compound the economic disadvantage and exclusion experienced by individuals and entire communities.

As noted by a United Nations (UN) women’s human rights mechanism, the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, “there has been a systemic failure to properly integrate the biological function of reproduction and the gendered function of unpaid caring into macroeconomic policy in a holistic, effective and coherent way, to ensure that reproduction and caring go hand-in-hand with the overall economic empowerment of women.”4 Further, economic policy choices are also political choices which governments do not exercise with an equal level of authority and freedom globally. What individual governments can do in response to a crisis depends largely on how much independence and flexibility they have to make macroeconomic policy decisions which respond to the needs of their people rather than external pressures. No doubt, their effectiveness also depends on what they determine as priorities, as well as their capacity for good governance, management, and prevailing levels of corruption in addition to the strength of their own national legal frameworks.

A human rights-based approach provides an important way to look at systemic disadvantage that is absolutely crucial to tackling structural inequality and discrimination. Inequality is not just a result of individual acts of prejudice and discrimination but is built into the structures of society as economies are designed to undervalue care work which is mainly provided in the home and unpaid. This has a ripple effect: from low pay, to precarity in the jobs that women undertake, to occupational segregation. Women continue to bear the primary responsibility for childcare and domestic work. The structure of the working day privileges full time work, which makes the double burden of paid and unpaid care work very difficult for women to manage and increases their exclusion from paid job opportunities with better social protection.

A human rights framework provides guidance on the obligations and positive duties of governments to address inequality by eliminating all forms of discrimination. Discrimination based on sex and gender is prevalent in the world of work where a pregnancy can be the basis for dismissal and paid maternity leave is not guaranteed to all women workers. Further, discrimination based on sex and gender underlies all forms of GBV, which is compounded by intersecting forms of discrimination based on, but not limited to, grounds such as race, ethnicity, age, occupation, disability, and migrant status. This trans- lates into disparities in access and further disadvantage to women and girls belonging to specific racial and ethnic groups, rural women, adolescent girls, those with disabilities, and informal women workers, many of whom are migrants. These workers are generally more vulnerable to both gender-based dis- crimination and violence.

The scope of GBV under international law has been expanded to explicitly recognize many reproductive health harms including, for example, unplanned pregnancy, unsafe abortion and maternal mortality, which are linked to the denial of women’s right to control their fertility and recognition of reproductive rights. Additionally, many risks to women’s reproductive health are occupational. Gender-based discrimination and violence exact a large societal toll from women and girls, the scope of which is yet to be recognized in legal and policy frameworks. For example, domestic violence has an impact on one’s ability to work, not only via physical injury, but also due to mental health status that affects both number of days worked as well as productivity.5

Gender equality is a human rights imperative. Consequently, it is relevant for policy makers to fully recognize the cost, at a macroeconomic level, of different forms of inequality. According to a study re- leased by the OECD in 2016, gender-based discrimination in formal and informal laws, social norms, and practices restricting women’s rights and access to opportunities costs the global economy an estimated 12 trillion USD.6 According to UN Women in 2016, the cost to the global economy of violence against women was 1.5 trillion USD, equivalent to 2% of the global gross GDP.7 In some countries, the cost of violence against women can reach up to 3.7% of their GDP, according to the World Bank.8 There are many studies that demonstrate the cost of violence against women to specific nations. However, governments are yet to systematically recognize these costs as losses to their economies and be accountable for the fact that they result from harmful policy choices. There is an urgent need for accountability for these losses that translate into violations of women’s most basic human rights and perpetuate gender inequality.

Click here to view and download the full report from the CWGL.