Feminist Economic Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article provides a contextual framework for understanding the gendered dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic and its health, social, and economic outcomes. The pandemic has generated massive losses in lives, impacted people's health, disrupted markets and livelihoods, and created profound reverberations in the home. In 112 countries that reported sex-disaggregated data on COVID-19 cases, men showed an overall higher infection rate than women, and an even higher mortality rate. However, women's relatively high representation in sectors hardest hit by lockdown orders has translated into larger declines in employment for women than men in numerous countries. Evidence also indicates that stay-at-home orders have increased unpaid care workloads, which have fallen disproportionately to women. Further, domestic violence has increased in frequency and severity across countries. The article concludes that policy response strategies to the crisis by women leaders have contributed to more favorable outcomes compared to outcomes in countries led by men.

How COVID-19 Pandemic Worsens the Economic Situation of Women in South Africa

“…This leads to women receiving less labour income than their male counterparts. These impacts have been described already by Kabeer et al ( 2021 ) as observation based on statistical data. Our CGE analysis extends this empirical observation by the insight on the intersectoral impacts between the economic sectors (i.e.…”

“…In a recent study, Kabeer et al ( 2021 ) review different independent studies and databases to analyse the gendered impacts of COVID-19 on health, domestic violence and labour markets. The authors identify different research gaps and call for more work on the gendered analysis of the intersectoral dimensions and on the economic outcomes (Kabeer et al 2021 ). Our study addresses these research gaps for South Africa as one of the most COVID-19 affected African countries (Roser et al 2020 ; Salgotra et al 2020 ).…”

“…We also analyse the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crises on women by using a microsimulation and poverty analysis. The quantitative results on impacts based on a consistent representation of an economy provide important information for designing and evaluating policies for dealing with the economic crises (Kabeer et al 2021 ).…”

Gender and COVID-19: What have we Learnt, One Year Later?

“…Though quantitative data on this topic is scarce, there is evidence from newspaper and human rights groups' reports that many of these workers not only lost their incomes and livelihoods when their host countries went into lockdowns, but also suffered severe violations of their workers' and human rights (e.g. when host families delayed or stopped paying them or limited their mobility) and were caught in a legal limbo due to travel bans in their home and/or host countries (Kabeer et al 2021;Rao et al 2021; see also the section on agency).…”

“…Indeed, females and males across specific socio-demographic groups (youth, older people, migrants, and refugees, etc.) have felt the consequences of the pandemic in particular ways (see Kabeer et al 2021, for a discussion). Throughout this paper we touch upon this important issue of intersectionality to the extent possible, though we leave it to future work to investigate it more systematically.…”