Pandemic patriarchy: The impact of a global health crisis on women’s rights

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a surge in patriarchal repression for women worldwide, with marked increases in gender violence, gendered job loss and deterioration in labor conditions, regression in health care access and reproductive rights, and backlash against feminist consciousness. Beyond intensifying chronic rights gaps and the preexisting conditions of patriarchy, the global health crisis has increased the gendered impact of interdependence across the social-civil-security rights domains, the public-private divide, and intersecting identities of gender, race, and class. The cumulation of these shifts constitutes a new phase of pandemic patriarchy that sets new parameters for the fulfillment of women’s rights in the international rights regime. The uneven rights regime response to the panoply of rights challenges under conditions of pandemic patriarchy shows that an adequate global response must move beyond the recognition of women’s rights as human rights to incorporate feminism as an ethic of care, struggle for systematic gender equity, and feminist reconstruction of global governance.

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Alison Brysk

Alison Brysk is Distinguished Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author or editor of 15 volumes on international human rights, including The struggle for freedom from fear: Contesting violence against women at the frontiers of globalization (Oxford University Press).