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 repercussions in the home.
Highlights:
- Emerging evidence suggests that women have suffered greater job losses than men in a number of nations worldwide.
- When it comes to stress and anxiety, COVID has a much bigger effect on married women doctors with children than on single women doctors.
- In the era of market liberalization, care and environmental services can and have been aggressively brought into the realm of market exchange.
The global consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are inextricably linked to the types of issues that feminist economists have studied for decades. The pandemic is both a health and socioeconomic crisis with gender-specific consequences. Gender differences in comorbidities like smoking, mobility, and activity outside the home help explain why the risk of contracting and dying from the virus varies so much across countries. Governments worldwide responded with lockdowns and orders to stay home, which caused many businesses to close and many people to lose their jobs. Emerging evidence suggests that women have suffered greater job losses than men in a number of nations owing to their overrepresentation in retail, food service, and hospitality, which are among the industries experiencing the most widespread business closures (Alon et al. 2020; International Labour Organization [ILO] 2020a; Wenham et al., 2020).
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