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 reverberations in the home. In 112 countries that reported sex-disaggregated data on COVID-19 cases, men showed an overall higher infection rate than women, and an even higher mortality rate. However, women’s relatively high representation in sectors hardest hit by lockdown orders has translated into larger declines in employment for women than men in numerous countries. Evidence also indicates that stay-at-home orders have increased unpaid care workloads, which have fallen disproportionately to women. Further, domestic violence has increased in frequency and severity across countries. The article concludes that policy response strategies to the crisis by women leaders have contributed to more favorable outcomes compared to outcomes in countries led by men.

In this podcast, Professor Darrick Hamilton critically discusses how current neoliberal economic models uphold a systemically racially unjust structure of economies.

In this sharp intervention, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.