Women face increased risk of violence, loss of livelihoods and other threats under the pandemic. © Unsplash/Tam Wai
Direct Link to Full 9-Page March 2020 UNFPA Document:
https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/resource-pdf/COVID-19_A_Gender_Lens_Guidance_Note.pdf
https://www.unfpa.org/news/pandemic-rages-women-and-girls-face-intensified-risks
19 March 2020 - UNITED NATIONS, New York – As the COVID-19 pandemic rages around the world, governments are taking unprecedented measures to limit the spread of the virus, ramping up health system responses and announcing movement restrictions affecting millions.
But amid these efforts, policymakers must not lose sight of the vulnerabilities of women and girls, which have been exacerbated by the crisis, says a UNFPA guidance note released today.has rapidly spread around the world since it was discovered late last year, appears most deadly among elderly populations and people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Accurate and complete sex-disaggregated data are still needed to understand whether and how women and men experience infection, complication and death risks differently.Yet even now, it is clear that women and girls face a variety of risk factors that must urgently be addressed.
“Disease outbreaks affect women and men differently,” says the new UNFPA guidance document, which covers how gender is playing a role in the unfolding pandemic. “Pandemics make existing gender inequalities for women and girls worse, and can impact how they receive treatment and care.”
Photo: María Elena Díaz Espinoza, a waste picker in Lima,Peru, collects recyclables on the streets in the neighborhood of Los Olivos. Credit: Juan Arredondo/Getty Images
WIEGO – Women in Informal Employment Globalizing & Organizing
By Laura Alfers
23 March 2020 - “Flattening the curve” has become a mantra of the COVID-19 pandemic — but calls for staying home and social distancing have starkly emphasized the inequalities in our society, including amongst workers.
Social distancing and staying home are real possibilities for middle-class office workers covered by social security. They are much less achievable for unprotected informal workers who fall between the cracks, excluded from formal work-related protections as well as from state social assistance programmes that target the very poor and those outside the labour market.
“I am afraid of the coronavirus,” said an informal worker in Mexico, “but I am more afraid of dying of hunger if there is no work.”
This stark reality is likely to be particularly pronounced for women informal workers, who will have to cope with a greater care burden while attempting to put food on the table.
Harvard Business Review - From the March–April 2020 Issue
https://hbr.org/2020/03/whats-really-holding-women-back
What’s Really Holding Women Back from More Progress at Work
By Robin J. Ely & Irene Padavic
As scholars of gender inequality in the workplace, we are routinely asked by companies to investigate why they are having trouble retaining women and promoting them to senior ranks. It’s a pervasive problem. Women made remarkable progress accessing positions of power and authority in the 1970s and 1980s, but that progress slowed considerably in the 1990s and has stalled completely in this century.
Ask people why women remain so dramatically underrepresented, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament—an unfortunate but inevitable “truth”—that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women’s devotion to family makes it impossible for them to put in those hours, and their careers suffer as a result. We call this explanation the work/family narrative. In a 2012 survey of more than 6,500 Harvard Business School alumni from many different industries, 73% of men and 85% of women invoked it to explain women’s stalled advancement. Believing this explanation doesn’t mean it’s true, however, and our research calls it seriously into question.
One of the posters of Dianova’s Human Empowerment campaign dedicated to raise awareness about the close relationship between addiction and gender
March 23, 2020 - Over the last decades, alcohol and drug-related disorders have spread dramatically and no nation remains immune to their considerable human and economic costs. Although rates of substance use disorders seem to be higher for men than for women, the physical and mental consequences can be more profound for the latter.
The prejudices and social stigma associated with female drug users delay the treatment process. On the one hand, they are pointed out for being drug users or having an addiction problem and, on the other hand, for not fulfilling the gender-related roles that are expected from them (double stigma). When they try and face such situations, stigma affects them to a greater extent. Addiction treatment programmes are generally grounded in an androcentric perspective that does not meet everyone’s needs, and engendering obstacles to treatment. For this reason as stated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, women account for only one out of five people in treatment for drug use.
More than6.7million persons hold a managerial position in the European Union of 27 Member States(EU): 4.3million men (63% of all managers) and 2.5million women (37%).
In addition, women account for a little over one quarter of board members of publicly listed companies in the EU(28%), and for less than one fifth of senior executives(18%)in 2019.In other words, although representing approximately half of all employed persons in the EU, women continue to be under-represented amongst managers.
This information is published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, on the occasion of International Women’s Day. This news release only shows a small part of the large amount of gender based data available at Eurostat.
Source: Eurostat – 06.03.2020
