Pandemics affect men and women differently.
By Helen Lewis March 19, 2020
In her article, Lewis discusses the effects of pandemics through a gendered perspective, illustrating how they impact men and women differently and how long-lasting these impacts can be even after the pandemic has passed. As has been pointed out by others during this crisis, a pandemic highlights existing inequalities between socio-economic statuses, educational privilege, job types, urban versus rural housing, etc. But another area of inequality that gets brought to the forefront is gendered caregiving responsibilities and income disparities between men and women.
The coronavirus smashes up the bargain that so many dual-earner couples have made in the developed world: We can both work, because someone else is looking after our children. Instead, couples will have to decide which one of them takes the hit.
The decision of who takes the hit on responsibilities is one based on societal norms as well as practical economic concerns regarding income and flexibility. Both of these factors contribute to women more often than not being selected as the one in heterosexual couples taking on more caregiving responsibilities for children being schooled from home. This is not just because of misogynistic norms surrounding gender roles in the household, though. It is largely because of the make-up of how many women versus men work part-time, and the economic stress of the pandemic on households has many couples making these decisions based on pragmatism.
According to the British government’s figures, 40 percent of employed women work part-time, compared with only 13 percent of men. In heterosexual relationships, women are more likely to be the lower earners, meaning their jobs are considered a lower priority when disruptions come along. And this particular disruption could last months, rather than weeks. Some women’s lifetime earnings will never recover.
For single-parent households, which are disproportionately female, this balancing between caregiving responsibilities while keeping up financially is even more difficult. The negative impacts on single-family households financially can be long-lasting and stark, which affects women’s economic outlook significantly. For both single and married women, hits on income take longer to recover for women versus men according to historical data taken from West Africa during and after the Ebola crisis.
The author pointed out past pandemics — the Ebola crisis in three African countries in 2014; Zika in 2015–6; and recent outbreaks of SARS, swine flu, and bird flu — and some of the gendered effects they had on society, as well as the lasting impacts on gender equality. Specifically, pandemics result in a distortion of the health system as resources are diverted from other causes towards the crisis. Healthcare issues that disproportionately affect women — such as prenatal care and childbirth — are deprioritized, and women pay the price for this. One staggering account was in Sierra Leone, one of the countries most impacted by the Ebola virus:
From 2013 to 2016, during the outbreak, more women died of obstetric complications than the infectious disease itself. But these deaths, like the unnoticed caring labor on which the modern economy runs, attract less attention than the immediate problems generated by an epidemic. These deaths are taken for granted.
There are also other consequences of pandemics that impact women on a larger scale than men that are more likely to be overlooked in popular media when addressing the myriad of effects a pandemic has on society. During the Ebola epidemic, domestic and sexual violence rose. While domestic and sexual violence do affect men as well, we know from historical and contemporary data that women are impacted on a greater level. Therefore, the author presents an interesting argument that the response to the Coronavirus should not be simply gender-neutral, because it impacts men and women differently, as evidence from the Ebola and Zika crises support. In rich and poor countries alike, experts predict that domestic-violence rates will rise during lockdown periods. This is because triggers for violence in the home — stress, alcohol consumption, and financial difficulties — are heightened by these quarantine measures being imposed around the world. Not only this, but victims of domestic violence will have fewer outlets to escape their perpetrators do to lockdowns:
The British charity Women’s Aid said in a statement that it was “concerned that social distancing and self-isolation will be used as a tool of coercive and controlling behaviour by perpetrators, and will shut down routes to safety and support.”
In light of this, many are calling for policy-makers to adjust their response so that it is gendered and is better apt to address these issues. Further, these advocates argue that this would also provide an opportunity to gather useful data stratified demographically for our society that would helpfully inform future responses to health crises like the one we are currently experiencing. Despite the historical evidence to back up their compelling argument, however, it still remains to be seen whether policy-makers will adjust their response in light of the gendered distortions in our healthcare system, caregiving responsibilities, and economic outlook.