The consequences of any health crisis affect men and women differently. Despite overwhelming evidence of this, the majority of responses to global health crises have rarely addressed this. The coronavirus response has been no different.
As an editor at International Affairs, the sister publication of The World Today, I have been looking into women’s marginalization in academic research and policymaking. Women’s work in this field has been harshly affected by the coronavirus, with the proportion of submissions by women to academic journals generally showing a significant decline since the start of the pandemic.
Before focusing on the marginalization of women in policy studies, it is worth sketching in the background of the impact of COVID-19 on women in general. Understanding this impact is especially complicated because the available sex-aggregated data shows that men are more likely to contract, be treated in hospital and to die from coronavirus.
