Giving Compass' Take:

• The COVID-19 pandemic does not impact everyone equally, and can severely interfere with the lives of women and girls. Here are some ways to mitigate these impacts in your home, organization, and in your program design initiative. 

• How can donors spearhead the effort to help women and girls during this pandemic? 

• Learn how COVID-19 response efforts impact women and girls. 

Despite its wide geographic spread, the COVID-19 pandemic has not affected everyone in the same way. The attempts of key decision-makers to limit the damage of COVID-19 involve each one of us, but the impacts of these choices are neither equally shared nor highly visible. As we have seen with the Ebola crisis in West Africa and other pandemics, attempts by key decision-makers to curtail the negative impacts of COVID-19 on public health and the economy, in fact, generate a multitude of unintended negative consequences for women and girls, and in most instances further exacerbate existing gender inequalities.

Both men and women can mitigate the disproportionate impact of these inequities. In this blog, we lay out three categories for how you can think about your pandemic response: in your home, in your organization, and in your initiative and program design.

In Your Home:

  • Ensure that men and boys share domestic and care work equally with women and girls:
  • Explore how to compensate those doing domestic work and care.

In Your Organization: 

  • Include (and demand) female voices in decision-making.
  • Adopt gender-inclusive workplace practices, measure their impact, and celebrate their success.
  • Be proactive in offering support and assistance

In Your Initiative Design: 

  • Re-visit your problem definition with a gender lens.
  • Collect and analyze data from women and men.
  • Work together to stopgap the resource deficit for vital services.

Issues that impact women affect our partners, mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and ourselves—particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis offers a platform to raise awareness of these issues, as well as shift our day-to-day attitudes, habits, and ways of working to benefit us all—male and female.

Read the full article about issues affecting women and girls during the pandemic by Flynn Lebus, Laura Amaya, Sujata Rathi, and Harshika Gupta at FSG.