As pandemic-driven health, social, economic, and hunger crises deepen across the globe, it is increasingly clear that COVID-19 is widening systemic inequalities that have long affected women, girls, and other people who face discrimination because of race and migration status. These dynamics threaten decades of progress in realizing the rights and equalities that all people should enjoy, and that women have fought hard to claim. CARE has warned from the beginning that the pandemic would have a disproportionate impact on women and girls. But foresight is only as good as the action it enables. The efficacy of CARE’s and others’ COVID 19 responses depends on understanding how marginalized people are affected, in all their diversity, across contexts, and over time. Women’s needs are routinely overlooked without deliberate efforts to fill persistent gender data gaps. So we sought the advice of experts: women themselves.
Across nearly 40 countries, the voices of more than 6,000 women bear out the dire predictions from March: that COVID-19 would result in catastrophic impacts across multiple dimensions of their lives. The growing scope of CARE’s data enables us to make more confident, global conclusions about the experiences of both women and men. Among those surveyed, women were more likely than men to report challenges across a range of areas.
Read the full report here.