EDITORIAL: Look out for our women and girls

It has been noted that the present COVID-19 pandemic, with its attendant socio-economic impacts, disproportionately affects women and these adverse effects include gender-based violence, undue burden of care, increased poverty, unemployment, underemployment and food insecurity.

According to UN Women, the COVID-19 pandemic underscores society’s reliance on women, both on the front line and at home, while simultaneously exposing structural inequalities across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection. In times of crisis, when resources are strained and institutional capacity is limited the organisation says, women and girls face disproportionate impacts, with far reaching consequences. Further,  hard-fought gains for women’s rights are also under threat. Thus, responding to the pandemic is not just about rectifying long-standing inequalities, but also about building a resilient world in the interest of everyone, with women at the centre of recovery.

As said earlier, economic crises hit women harder, for a number of reasons. For instance, women tend to earn less, women are disproportionately more in the informal economy, women have less access to social protections, women are more likely to be burdened with unpaid care and domestic work, and therefore have to drop out of the labour force and women make up the majority of single-parent households. Thus, these are areas in which we have to turn our focus, if we want to look out for our women and girls.

In the UN Secretary-General’s policy brief entitled, “The impact of COVID-19 on women”, it has been noted that with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, even the limited gains made in the past decades are at risk of being rolled back. Further, the pandemic is deepening pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems, which are in turn amplifying the impacts of the pandemic and across every sphere, from health to the economy, security to social protection. The impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women and girls, simply by virtue of their sex. Thus, the policy brief by the UN Secretary-General explores how women and girls’ lives are changing in the face of COVID-19, and outlines suggested priority measures to accompany both the immediate response and longer-term recovery efforts. We should pay some attention here and see how we can make life a bit better for our females, as we seek to emerge from this pandemic.

It has been said that most of the world’s nations are not doing enough to protect women and girls from the economic and social fallout being caused by the COVID-19 crisis, according to new data released recently by UNDP and UN Women from the COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker. Officials here in Barbados may need to state exactly where we stand, in terms of what measures are being taken to ensure that women and girls are not disproportionately affected by this pandemic and how exactly we plan to assist women especially, who are heading households as single parents, but who have been hard hit by COVID. We may need greater emphasis placed on ensuring that the unemployment figures amongst the female population are reduced and they have greater economic security. Our welfare systems may need to step up a bit more for those who are impoverished.

Whatever we do, we must work to ensure that our women and girls are not left out in the cold, even as we seek to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.