Resilient but Vulnerable: Revealing COVID-19's Effects on Women

Societal norms, systems, and values of a society immensely influence gender issues. Crises, whether natural disasters, pandemics, or humanitarian emergencies, profoundly impact societies, often exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus on promoting gender equality to mitigate gender disparity was based on improving educational access to all and economic development from the micro to the macro level. The pandemic has impacted individuals, communities, and societies worldwide in an adverse way. While the virus itself did not discriminate based on gender, the social, economic, and political ramifications of the pandemic have disproportionately affected women (Venkatachary et al., 2020). The existing gender disparities have been accelerated, leading to a widening of the gap between men and women in various spheres of life.

One of the key areas where the pandemic has highlighted the challenges faced by women is in the realm of employment, financial, and social security. The pandemic-induced lockdowns and social distancing measures have led to widespread job losses, business closures, and disruptions to the labor market, with women being more vulnerable to these impacts due to their overrepresentation in specific sectors (Afridi et al., 2023). Additionally, the increased domestic and caregiving responsibilities placed on women during the pandemic due to school closures and the need to care for family members have further hindered their ability to maintain their employment and participate in the available work opportunities. The pandemic has also had a significant impact on women's mental health and well-being (Sutton et al., 2023). As the pandemic increased the existing gender disparities by adding a significant health dimension to the gender equality discourses, it is essential to understand the change in the dimensions to navigate the agendas in the post-pandemic era. 

In this article, the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic fallout on women will be discussed. This monograph will deconstruct it, explaining the disproportionate economic and health impacts on women compared to men, which revealed gender inequality in an upward-shifted dimension.

Figure 1: Street Art Real-Life Superwoman (Fake, 2020)

Economic Downturns Take Their Toll on Women

The existing gender inequality in the labor market was already biased towards men in terms of the type of work and wages. Compared to "regular" recessions, which damage men's employment more severely than women's employment, the workforce decline caused by social distancing measures has a significant impact on women, as industries were more prone to female employment layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic (Alon et al., 2020). The main reason behind this is the existing occupation segregation based on gender, where the overrepresentation of women in "physical contact" jobs made them vulnerable to losing jobs faster.

The key issue with gender-segregated jobs is that male-dominated jobs tend to offer higher pay, better benefits, more full-time positions, and greater chances of upward mobility (promotions) than female-dominated jobs, even when controlling for the skill and education required (Levanon et al., 2009, as cited by Yavorsky, 2022, p. 3). Occupation segregation worldwide featured women working specifically in the care sector, as in the educational field, healthcare sector, domestic help, hotel and hospitality, and other front desk services like receptionists and salespersons in the pre-pandemic era. A significant proportion of women work in the garments and textile industry. All these job sectors require a physical presence to continue work, and the lockdowns in the pandemic made all the enterprises in these job sectors close down except the healthcare sector. Since the healthcare industry was the sole industry open 24/7, healthcare workers (67% women, WHO, 2022) were exposed to dangers to their lives and a great deal of ethical pressure to treat individuals infected by the coronavirus. As a consequence, it was the women who were fighting the pandemic not only as the front-foot frontier but also dealing with long-standing gender imbalances, which heightened their struggles.

The pandemic categorized the nature of the labor market into essential and non-essential jobs. Essential jobs were those that were significantly prioritized to tackle the pandemic crisis, like healthcare professions. Non-essential jobs were those that were not essential to perform during a state of emergency, like administrative workers of a business. As a result, every economy witnessed three phenomena as an immediate response to the pandemic. One was the rising unemployment due to the lockdown; the second was the high health risk of those working continuously on the front line; and the third was the shifting of working culture, i.e., working from home (WFH) and depending on wireless and telecommunication.

Figure 2: Us (without you), I (Hahn, 2020)

The pandemic's economic fallout has reduced employment most significantly in non-essential service sectors that require high personal contact, and it is the women who were mostly working in these sectors who became direct prey of the lockdown not having paid jobs anymore, forcing them towards unwanted and non-volunteered unemployment. There were some industries that offered unstable hour shifts, such as hospitality and food services, retail, cleaning, and domestic care. In developed countries, for example, the USA, migration dynamics made mostly women of color work in these sectors (Kalleberg et al., 2013). Loss of income through unpaid jobs and unemployment made it more difficult for migrants in other countries to relocate themselves due to the lockdown and also stopped sending remittances to their families in their home countries.

However, the gender disparities also varied differently in different regions depending on the gender gap index. The direct impact came on women drastically in those regions where the gender gap was high prior to the pandemic. In Europe, where the gender equality index is higher, the impact on women was modest. In European Union member states, though both women and men lost their jobs as a response to the lockdown, the vulnerable group in Europe was mostly 16–25-year-old women who used to work predominantly in retail (EIGE, 2021). During the lockdown when telework was normalized, most women recovered from taking up remote jobs; for instance, 41% of women and 37% of men reported having taken up telework at the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 (Sostero et al., 2020). On the contrary, in India, overall, 61% of working men remained employed and seven percent lost employment compared to 19% of working women who kept their jobs, and 47% of women suffered a permanent job loss, not returning to work (Center of Sustainable Employment, 2020). Some manufacturing industries, like the garment industry, have been historically women-dominated. The biggest garment industries in the world, China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, have seen about 30%, 17%, and 9.2% reductions in exports in the first year of the pandemic, respectively, with millions of women losing jobs. In Bangladesh, the ripple effect caused women to suffer, as female employment in the garments industry dropped by 6.9% in 2020 and was further reduced by 4.2% in 2021 compared to their male counterparts, where men experienced 2.5% in 2020 and 1.5% in 2021, respectively (ILO, 2022).

Another reason why women faced immediate layoffs during the pandemic is deeply rooted in the type of job contract that they worked in the pre-pandemic era. The frequency of women securing permanent contracts is often lower in occupations where there is horizontal segregation, where women and men work simultaneously in the same sector (Cortés & Forsythe, 2022; Morgenroth et al., 2021). In many occupations, women were more likely to be employed in temporary or fixed-term contracts, which made them more vulnerable to layoffs during the economic downturn (Montenovo et al., 2020). Different factors like years of service, performance, qualifications, and absence records caused by maternal leave and sick leaves create gender bias, and employers limit women to having permanent contracts. It is most likely to arrange another replacement employee when a woman is on maternal leave. This preexisting phenomenon filtered women when the pandemic hit hard on the economy, and layoffs were made by the profit-making enterprises prioritizing permanent contract holders.

Figure 3: Women Garment Workers (Olokkhiart, 2022)

The magnitude of women being dropped off from the labor force is known as "she-cession” (Fabrizio et al., 2021). This economic impact changed women’s role in society, pushing them to do unpaid care work and exposing them to financial insecurity, dependency, and vulnerability. For single women, the financial burden was directly affecting their lives as the basic necessities (rent, food, utilities) were cut off due to income loss; for single mothers, it became more difficult as the child care and financial responsibility both were attached to them (Rougeaux et al., 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic, many men and women found themselves spending much more time at home due to lockdowns and remote work. However, the distribution of household and care responsibilities did not become equitable. The pandemic led to a significant rise in domestic work, such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children or elderly family members. While both men and women were home more often, women took on the majority of these additional tasks; this intensified their already substantial unpaid labor load (Yavorsky et al., 2021). On the contrary, women with a family faced a disproportionate amount of care demanded from them for the nurturing of their children and elders in the family as the daycare centers remained closed. The social support schemes also faced challenges prioritizing distributing minimum financial resources to the vulnerable. The countries with lower income, especially in the global south, where the social benefit features are not available, put women in helpless situations depending on governmental aid only. In essence, the pandemic did not just impact women’s lives downward but also impacted different women’s lives differently where race, ethnicity, gender, and occupation played vital roles in single factorial and multifactorial ways compared to men.

Health Distress and Gender-Based Violence

The health impact of the COVID pandemic was widespread, causing everyone to deal with tremendous physical, emotional, and mental distress. The disease itself caused suffering to people who got infected by coronavirus. However, it impacted women to a different level compared to men being exposed to multiple reproductive, social, and mental circumstances. The "opportunity cost" of the lockdown and prioritizing pandemic-related health services solely changed the functioning of the whole healthcare system. Almost every healthcare system in the world faced a pitfall and had to focus on managing available limited resources focusing on pandemic-related healthcare such as medical equipment, medications and vaccines, supplies of oxygen, and emergency healthcare. The pandemic disrupted access to essential healthcare services for many women. Lockdowns and the tensions in healthcare systems caused delays and cancellations in routine medical appointments, including crucial reproductive health services such as prenatal care, contraceptive access, screening for cervical cancer, and abortion services. In England, cervical cancer screening tests were on hold during the pandemic, and an additional 860 cervical cancers are predicted over the next three years as a consequence of reduced access to cervical screening during the pandemic (Davies et al., 2022). These disruptions often led to negative externalities, including adverse maternal and child health outcomes in some regions. For mothers with young infants, the pandemic's psychosocial impact may inflame pre-existing psychosocial stress related to pregnancy, birth, and caring for a young child. Especially in light of COVID-19 measures that limited crucial emotional and practical support by limiting the availability of appointments and delivery, postnatal services, and social interactions (Rougeaux et al., 2022). Telehealth or e-health services emerged as an alternative, but not all women had equal access due to technological and socio-economic barriers. On the other hand, some studies showed a positive impact on women’s physical health, hypothesizing that staying home included a better diet in their lives and less exposure to air pollution (Rousconi et al., 2023).

Figure 4: Lockdown (More, 2022)

Beyond physical health or as a consequence of physical health deterioration, women suffered mostly from emotional and mental distress. Limited access to the outside world, laying off women from the job market, continuously availing themselves of unpaid care support in the house for children and elders, and violence by intimated partners exposed them to massive depression, trauma, and anxiety. While the data on mental health are abundant in developed countries compared to developing and lower-developed countries, there is a research gap existing on how particularly COVID-19 impacted women’s mental health in peripheral countries before and after the pandemic era. However, existing studies show women are associated with anxiety, depression, and worrying about more for themselves and their family members than their male counterparts. In India, women’s mental distress is caused mostly by financial and health concerns. (Afridi et al., 2023). One vital factor during the pandemic was lockdown, which limited physical human communications, and it drastically affected both men and women in regards to their social networks, putting them in monotonous routines and loneliness. Though Sheldon Cohen and Thomas Ashby Wills discuss how social networks can buffer stress by providing support, Ichiro Kawachi and Lisa F. Berkman argue that networks may also amplify stress through the pressure to support others, which could disproportionately affect women due to their higher empathy levels than men (Afridi et al., 2023). This ambiguity of social network theories has implications for different groups of people differently, but for India, the empirical evidence showed women having a large social network before the pandemic led to increased stress during the crisis. Instead of providing relief, these connections added to their burden. Therefore, while social networks generally help men by lowering their stress, they can increase the stress for women by adding more emotional and supportive responsibilities.

Another way that women suffered from physical, emotional, and mental health distress is by being locked in the house with previous incidences of physical and sexual abuse by their intimate partners. In the past, most crises have been associated with women exposed to domestic and intimate partner violence throughout the world, and the COVID pandemic was not an exception. Recent outbreaks such as Ebola, Cholera, Zika, and Nipah have also led to an increase in cases of domestic violence (Davies et al., 2006, as cited by Ostadtaghizadeh et al., 2023). Gender-based violence (GBV) is a byproduct of gender inequality, and during the pandemic crisis, the increasing amount of reports filed through emergency calls and on different mental health support helplines in developed countries was alarming. In the U.K., the Office for National Statistics (ONS) indicated an increase in police-recorded domestic abuse incidents, marking an 11% rise, and in the USA, 8.1% in the early period of the pandemic (Piquero et al., 2021, as cited by Sutton et al., 2023). GBV by intimate partner included beating, physical injury, unconsensual sex, and nonphysical violence like verbal abuse. In developing and lower-income countries where societal norms are based on an entrenched patriarchal system, women usually do not file reports against their partners. Online and remote services were not always accessible or safe for all victims, especially those living in remote areas or without private access to technology. According to Valencia et al. (2021), the declining political and economic role of women and women's economic dependence on men have led to sexual, physical, and psychological violence against women (Ostadtaghizadeh et al. 2023). Moreover, the government’s role during the pandemic regarding GBV is questionable, as the lockdown resulted in the closing of rehabilitation and support centers where women can call for help (Bi̇ngöl & Yeni̇lmez, 2020). The rising GBV by intimate partners amidst the pandemic is explained by UN Women as a "shadow pandemic," where the physical and non-physical forms of violence against women continued to increase as lockdowns and social isolation measures trapped victims with their abusers and limited access to support services.

Figure 5: Domestic Abuse (Ann Kiernan, 2022)

To conclude, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought numerous discourses of existing gender inequalities, highlighting the additional dimensions experienced by women across diverse races, ethnicities, and regions. As the crisis unfolded, it became evident that the governance and health systems worldwide were ill-equipped to tackle these disparities, leading to a disproportionate impact on women’s well-being compared to men. Acknowledging this imbalance is crucial for shaping future policies to recover in the post-pandemic period. Authorities must take deliberate actions to address and rectify the silent sacrifices borne by women during the pandemic. A multidisciplinary approach is essential to comprehensively study these gender disparities, exploring intersections across socio-economic status, feminist perspectives, public policy, and overall health research. Understanding these complex layers will provide valuable insights into how different crises uniquely affect women, thereby opening a broader scope for research and evaluation. 

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