ABSTRACT
As COVID-19 continues to affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, important questions are beginning to be asked about its gendered impacts. Although countries have adopted different approaches to minimise the impacts of the pandemic, there was widespread imposition of lockdown policies to curb the spread of the virus, with long-lasting consequences. It was widely assumed that “staying home” was the safest option and that “we are all in this together”. Yet structural inequalities have meant that the poorest and most vulnerable have been disproportionately impacted, and in most cases, women are overrepresented in these categories. According to the World Economic Forum (2021), another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity as the time required to change the global gender gap has increased from 99.5 years to 135.6 years. As women have been at the frontline of managing the crisis in their roles as essential workers and care providers, it remains of paramount importance to consider the gendered effects of lockdown policies to ensure that subsequent recovery strategies are gender sensitive and inclusive.
This chapter builds on emerging feminist critiques of the COVID-19 policy response by focusing on lockdown policies and analysing their asymmetric impact on women and men at work and in domestic spheres. It will start by examining how gender roles and pre-existing gender gaps shaped the distribution of labour “at home”. Subsequently, it will consider the intersectionality of gender with other factors such as migration status and social class through the question of domestic workers and the exploitation they faced when they became “prisoners” of their workplace. Lastly, it will analyse the precarity of female labour and assess the adequacy of some of the support mechanisms which were put in place across the world.
