1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19
The Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19 is the first comprehensive research guide for researchers and students who seek to study and evaluate the complex relationship between gender and COVID-19.
This interdisciplinary collection touches on two major themes: first, how gender played a central role in shaping access to testing, treatment, and vaccines. Second, how the pandemic not only deepened existing gender inequalities, but also those along the lines of race, class, sexuality, disability, and immigration status.
Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars across a number of disciplinary perspectives, this intersectional and comparative focus on COVID explores topics including the pandemic’s impact on families, employment, childcare and elder care, human rights, as well as gender and political economy and leadership, public health law, disability rights, and abortion access.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19 is an essential volume for scholars and students of Law, Gender Studies, Sociology, Health, Economics, and Politics.
PART I. TRAINING A GENDER LENS ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
1. Introduction: Researching Gender and COVID-19
Aziza Ahmed and Linda C. McClain
2. Law as a Determinant of Health: COVID-19 and Gender
Michael Thomson
3. Health Justice: Feminism, Universalism, and Vulnerability in Pandemic Response
Lindsay F. Wiley and Seema Mohapatra
4. We Are Not in This Together: Toward a Feminist Public Finance
Jamee K. Moudud
PART II. FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES
5. Gender, COVID, and Care
Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit
6. Pandemics, Privatization, and Public Education
Melissa Murray and Caitlin Millat
7. Pandemic Impact and Women’s Resilience in China
Xiaoqian Hu, Yanliu Tao, and Qichen Zhang
8. The Promise and Perils of Technology and Gender in the Courts
Naomi M. Mann
9. Lessons from Pandemic Co-parenting: Toward Family Mediation that Centers Low-Income, Never-Married Black Mothers
Tianna N. Gibbs
10. Queer Inequality: The COVID-19 Spotlight
Erez Aloni
PART III. ECONOMY, LABOR, AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
11. Care and Economic Crisis
Lyn Ossome
12. COVID-19 and Vulnerable Groups: Experiences of Sexual Minorities in Barbados
Daniele Bobb and Leigh-Ann Worrell
13. Does the EU COVID-19 Recovery Plan Care About Care?
Irena Rosenthal
14. The Resilience of Gender Equality: How COVID-19 Was Gendered in Norway
Mari Teigen and Kjersti Misje Østbakken
15. Manufacturing Crisis, Exacerbating Vulnerabilities: A Feminist Perspective on Crisis, Calamity, and the Political Economy of Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Saru M. Matambanadzo
16. COVID-19 She-Cession: The Employment Penalty of Childcare
Stefania Fabrizio, Diego B. P. Gomes, and Marina M. Tavares
17. After the “Shecession”: Post-Pandemic Law and Policy for Working Mothers
Julie C. Suk
18. Gender Inequality and the Increase of Unpaid Care Work in Mexico During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Itzel Mayans and Moisés Vaca
PART IV. HEALTH
19. Applying HIV Activism's Public Health Approach to Defeat COVID
Scott Skinner-Thompson
20. Masculinity, Partisanship, and Responses to COVID-19 in the US
Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino
21. Gendered Effects of U.S. Pandemic Border Policy on Migrants from Central America
Medha D. Makhlouf
22. Gender and Human Rights in the Context of COVID-19
Alice M. Miller and Mindy Roseman
23. Lockdowns, Gender, and Health
Jeni Klugman, Rifqah Abeeda Roomaney, Avantika Ranjan, Kanksha Barman, and Indrani Gupta
PART V. REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH
24. The Resilience of Reproductive Rights
Rachel Rebouché
25. Reproductive Justice for Disabled People During COVID-19 and Beyond
Robyn M. Powell
26. The Shift of Medication Abortion Care Delivery Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on the Future of Sexual and Reproductive Health in the United States
Rebekah Rollston
27. Abortion Access in a Post-COVID and Post-Roe World
Maya Manian
28. Religious Exemptions and Gender Equality in a Pandemic
Elizabeth Sepper
29. Impact of COVID-19 on the Reproductive Rights of Marginalized Women in India
Jayshree Satpute
30. Access to Abortion During COVIC-19 in India: Gaps and Challenges
Dipika Jain and Krithika Balu
PART VI. POLITICS AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
31. Sharing is Caring: Women of Color California State Legislators Take to Facebook During COVID-19 Lockdowns as a Form of Constituent Services
Erik Hanson, Michael Strawbridge, Nadia E. Brown, and Natalie Masuoka
32. Women’s Leadership is Associated with Few COVID-19 Deaths and Better Communication
Supriya Garikipati, Uma Kambhampati, and Abhilash Kondraganti
33. Leadership in the Lands Down Under? A Comparative Print Media Analysis of the Morrison and Ardern Government COVID-19 Responses
Blair Williams
34. The Gendered Effects of COVID in Colombia: Looking Beyond the Numbers
Helena Alviar García, Lina Buchely Ibarra, and Laura Porras Santanilla
35. COVID-19, International Trade Law and the Gendered Dimensions of the Global Vaccine Apartheid: A Rights-Based Analysis
Jackie Dugard, Mandivavarira Mudarikwa, and Nicola Soekoe
Biography
Linda C. McClain is the Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law and co-director of the BU Program in Reproductive Justice. Her areas of interest include family law, gender and law, feminist legal theory, civil rights, and law and literature. Among her books are Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts Over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (2020), Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (2013) with James E. Fleming, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (2006), and the co-authored Contemporary Family Law (6th ed. 2023).
Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health Law at the Boston University School of Law and co-director of the BU Program on Reproductive Justice. Her work focuses on the interactions between law, science, and politics with a focus on gender and health. She is the author of the forthcoming book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS. Professor Ahmed is on the board of Our Bodies, Our Selves and the advisory board of the Lawyering Project. She has previously served on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts.
"Arundhati Roy famously urged us to use the pandemic as a portal to a more just future. This powerful collection reveals the gendered paradoxes of COVID—from intersectional, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives— uncovering alarming insights and offering thoughtful solutions that call for a new ethics, politics, and law of care, community, and connection, even while our pandemics of inequality, poverty, and disinformation continue to rage."
Catherine Powell, Eunice Carter Distinguished Research Scholar Professor of Law, Fordham Law School
"In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, out of “all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” Those words were prescient and surfaced powerfully during the triple pandemics of COVID-19, systemic racism, and sexism – with both the “color and gender of COVID-19” on vivid display. This essential volume allows us to understand the intersectional way that gendered and raced effects operate using the “pandemic as a portal” to expose how COVID-19 exacerbates preexisting disparities and amplifies their disparate impact. This insightful book helps us to consider more fully how to rectify health inequities."
Matiangai Sirleaf, Nathan Patz Professor of Law, University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law
“This volume exemplifies how sex and gender influence health through an important, unique set of multidisciplinary, multi-country analyses. While the effects of COVID-19 are acute in our memory—and continue to surface in everyday life—this volume provides us with analytical approaches that should inform policy and research for years to come. As the pieces from India illustrate, public health understanding or action is incomplete without incisive analyses of the legal, economic and social forces that shape it.”
Sapna Desai, Senior Fellow, Population Council Institute, India; Member, India Task Force of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19
