Following a moving target on a global scale: Gender data collection during COVID-19

Abstract

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, feminists in academia, international organizations and civil society were quick to predict that its impact on gender equality would be detrimental (Alon et al., 2020; UN Secretary General, 2020; Wenham et al., 2020). To make their case, they first drew on evidence and lessons from previous crises, but then moved swiftly to collect, analyze and disseminate real-time data—both quantitative and qualitative. This “groundswell of expert activism” (Harman, 2021: 617) was driven by the purposeful and often innovative action of committed gender equality advocates across institutional spaces. Between March 2020 and March 2021, for example, UN Women conducted rapid gender assessments in over 50 countries, collecting gender data on the impact of COVID19 on employment, unpaid care, mental and physical health, and access to government relief through specially designed surveys.1 These and other impact data left no doubt about the gendered fallout of the pandemic, but were governments heeding these insights to inform their response and recovery efforts? Being able to answer this question seemed critical to shape the global policy discourse and hold national governments to account. By May 2020, however, not one of the global policy trackers that monitored government responses to the pandemic included a gender perspective. Public health trackers— such as the WHO COVID-19 Health System Monitor2—focused squarely on first order responses, ignoring measures to address second-order effects such as increasing rates of domestic violence or limited access to sexual and reproductive health services. Meanwhile, trackers monitoring the economic and social policy response—including the ILO’s Social Protection Monitor,3 the World Bank’s Real Time Review of Social Protection and Jobs Responses4 or the IMF’s macroeconomic response tracker5—provided no indication of whether and how countries were responding to large-scale job losses in feminized sectors, women’s heightened poverty risk and rising unpaid care