Nine countries, one pattern: COVID-19 policies consistently failed women

Women ran the pandemic response. They staffed hospitals, distributed vaccines, kept schools functioning where possible, and absorbed the unpaid care work that surged when formal support systems collapsed. Then, overwhelmingly, pandemic policies failed to protect them from the consequences.

That is the central finding of Feminism and COVID-19: How Women Fare in the Face of a Global Crisis, a new compendium published by MIT Press and co-edited by Dr. Julia Smith of Simon Fraser University and Dr. Clare Wenham from the London School of Economics. The book draws on nine case studies spanning Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom.

A pattern that held across continents

The case studies reveal a consistent dynamic regardless of geography, income level, or political system. Women were simultaneously essential to pandemic response and disproportionately harmed by its secondary effects. Lost income, increased domestic violence, and a dramatic expansion of unpaid care responsibilities appeared in country after country.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, researchers documented the unequal burden of responsibilities that fell on women during lockdowns. In Brazil, a team found that the division of labor -- paid and unpaid -- shifted sharply against women during the crisis. In Kenya, community health volunteers, most of them women, continued working with little institutional support. "Since they call us volunteers, there is no support at all," one Kenyan health worker told researchers.

The UK chapter focuses on pregnant women navigating maternity care during rapidly changing restrictions. In China, female first responders described encountering patronizing protectiveness from male colleagues rather than institutional support.

Why existing frameworks failed

The book argues that pandemic preparedness frameworks were not gender-neutral in practice, even when they claimed to be in design. Emergency response protocols typically treat populations as undifferentiated groups, allocating resources based on infection rates and hospital capacity rather than the social structures that determine who bears the cost of disruption.

Smith and Wenham's editorial framework pushes against the assumption that health emergencies create ruptures that lead to structural change. The evidence across all nine case studies points in the opposite direction: crises tend to reinforce existing inequalities rather than disrupt them. Dr. Jennifer Piscopo of the University of London, reviewing the volume, noted that it shows health emergencies "actually reinscribe patriarchy and intersectional inequalities."

"To facilitate pandemic preparedness, we now must learn from the past," Smith said. "These case studies include a multitude of lessons on how to ensure those at the center of pandemic response -- women -- are also protected from its worst effects."

From documentation to planning

The book's final chapter, authored by a team including Heang-Lee Tan, Kate Hawkins, and Rosemary Morgan, lays out a framework for gender-responsive pandemic planning. The approach calls for incorporating gender analysis into preparedness from the outset rather than treating it as an afterthought once a crisis has already begun.

The multidisciplinary author team includes economists, public health researchers, political scientists, and community-level practitioners. This breadth is intentional: the editors argue that understanding gendered pandemic impacts requires looking beyond epidemiology to labor economics, political structures, and household dynamics.

Limits of the evidence

The book covers nine countries, which offers geographic breadth but not exhaustive coverage. Large regions of South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America beyond Brazil are not represented. The case studies rely heavily on qualitative methods -- interviews, focus groups, and lived experience accounts -- which provide depth but limited statistical generalizability.

Several chapters acknowledge that data collection itself was disrupted by the pandemic, creating gaps that future research will need to address. The compendium is strongest as a comparative framework and weakest where it attempts broad policy prescriptions from localized findings.

Still, the consistency of the pattern across vastly different contexts is itself a finding. When the same dynamic appears in Bangladesh and Britain, in Nigeria and Hong Kong, the explanation is unlikely to be local. Something structural is at work.

The book does not claim that COVID-19 created gender inequality. It argues that pandemic responses amplified inequalities that already existed, and that future preparedness planning must account for this amplification if it is to be effective.