Pandemic management in the EU through gendered lenses: a comparative analysis using the Oxford Covid government response tracker

Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis has led to unprecedented containment measures, often at the expense of allegedly less urgent priorities, such as gender parity, raising a substantial risk of reversing the recent progress even in contexts such as that of the European Union which have long made female empowerment and an equal society a mainstreamed objective in all areas of policymaking. The contribution considers pandemic responses through gendered lenses to provide a cross-country comparison within the EU27 during the first year of the pandemic health crisis. On the basis of the early literature on the gendered impact of the pandemic, we single out particularly problematic containment measures for equality (school closures and lockdowns). Accordingly, we develop a scoreboard of the over-reliance on such measures across the EU27, showing heterogeneities which cannot be reduced to the different severity of the outbreak and containment effort. Results show best and worst performers from the perspective of a gendered response outlook, pinpointing how such negative dynamics are especially concentrated in the South and East of Europe. The work highlights the importance of evaluating gendered implications of all policy measures and the urgency to mitigate the legacy of Covid-19 restrictions by putting equality at the centre stage of the pandemic recovery effort.