Centring intersecting gender inequalities of COVID-19 on womxn

Abstract

Emerging research and media reports suggest that COVID-19 has worsened gender inequality within the social, economic and political domains at community, national and international levels. Examples of such gendered disparities may be seen in the increase in child marriages, unwanted and unplanned teenage pregnancies, increasing homelessness of poor womxn, migrants and transwomen, evictions due to lack of rent and the heightened killing of LGBTIQ+ persons. This means that progress towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -particularly SDG5 which seeks to achieve gender equality and to empower all womxn and girls - that our governments have been reporting on in the past few years, has been greatly affected. Government and institutional responses seem to be paralysed by what Julia Smith (2019) refers to as the 'tyranny of the urgent', characterised by priorisation of medical and economic imperatives over other structural dynamics of the pandemic. In particular, the emerging research and debates have been largely devoid of an intersectional gendered or feminist analysis, leaving the gendered impacts of the pandemic invisible and unaddressed.