COVID-19: AN OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE A MORE EQUAL WORLD
The Covid-19 crisis has hit women and girls differentially and disproportionately. There is increased feminisation of poverty, domestic work and care burden and a rise in domestic violence. Marginalised women can’t access health care, family planning and education; and millions have lost jobs and income.
The calamity also presents an unmissable opportunity to tear down structural barriers to gender equality. We can usher in the New Normal of Gender Equality and Women Empowerment (GEWE) that feminists have dreamt of, along with that of the post-pandemic future. Governments, businesses and civil society must awaken six interrelated chakras or energy centres to transform the post-pandemic world into a gender equal one and meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The first chakra is to forge genderresponsive disaster management, humanitarian response strategies and institutions. They must incorporate women’s needs and perspectives and their participation and leadership in all aspects.
The second chakra is addressing the “pandemic of inequality around the world” from an intersectional feminist prism. Women’s socioeconomic identities — race, religion, caste, age, class, multidimensional poverty, rural/urban and migrant status — intersect, compounding gender discrimination. Addressing these holistically will have a force multiplier effect on human rights. A universal social protection revolution based on a new social contract is key. The objective must be to leave no one — no woman or girl behind, as per sarvodaya /antodaya and SDGs.
The third awakens women’s economic empowerment for and through a gender-responsive national economic renaissance. This includes rebuilding infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, services and local, national and global supply chains and climate-resilient, green production and consumption through Atmanirbhar Bharat.
These must integrate, foster, value and even privilege women’s skills, labour, enterprise and leadership in all sectors. Targeted and mainstreamed measures, incentives and transformative investments by the government and private sector are required. The fourth chakra must enable technological empowerment of women and girls to benefit from, and contribute to, an equitable new normal of an accelerated fourth industrial revolution and digitised world. Governance, infrastructure and investment must close digital and technology gender gaps. Women must be enabled to adapt to and benefit from frontier technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, to digital work, learning, payments, health and commerce. The fifth must ensure universal access to affordable, accessible and quality health care for all women and girls. A revamped and expanded health, medical and pharmaceutical infrastructure and services, with an enhanced 3-5% percentage of the GDP investment, must be powered by women’s agency and employment. It must serve women and girls health care and health security needs, especially sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The sixth is 21st century gender-responsive education systems that must enable women and girls to achieve SDG 4 on inclusive and equitable, quality education for all. The National Education Policy must close the literacy, numeracy, primary, secondary, tertiary, higher education and skills-related gender gaps.