“Patriarchal reset” in the asia pacific during COVID-19: the impacts on women’s security and rights

Abstract

COVID-19 has disrupted social, economic and political life across the Asia Pacific region, with particularly deleterious impacts on women. Rather than equitably affecting all, COVID-19 has brought about a “patriarchal reset”, exacerbating women’s health and care labour burdens and heightening the physical violence against women and other threats to women’s human rights. This paper examines global health governance in the region from a feminist political economy perspective. We ask how has the pandemic and associated lockdowns affected women’s safety and access to economic resources and services on the one hand, and ‘women, peace and security’ (WPS) practitioners’ capacity to safeguard women’s rights in fragile settings on the other hand? We examine the gendered impacts of COVID-19 based on two surveys of WPS practitioners during 2020. Significant rises in domestic and gender-based violence, reduced access to reproductive health services, and increased income insecurity were all perceived and/or experienced during COVID-19 restrictions. WPS practitioners delivered services to mitigate these effects of COVID-19 despite overall less funding than before COVID-19. With the benefit of primary data, we explore how a more radical approach is needed to understand and transform gender relations in light of gender-based violence and depletion of women’s labour.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• Gender Inequality
• Depletion
• Women
• Peace and Security Agenda
• Asia Pacific Region
• Violence Against Women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Meckelburg and Bal (2021) and Bao (2020) for examples of local and community responses to COVID-19 in Indonesia and China

2 The full questionnaire is available athttps://bridges.monash.edu/articles/report/Mapping_the_Impact_of_COVID-19_in_the_Indo-Pacific_Region_II_Women_peace_and_security_practitioner_views/12936206 for review.

3 The project was approved by the Monash University Ethics Committee and meets the requirements of the Australia National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, 15/4/2020 (approval no. 24319).

4 English, Arabic, Burmese, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Nepali, Sinhala, Tagalog, Tamil and Vietnamese. The translation teams were native speakers of the target language, and surveys were checked for translation accuracy by a second gender expert and native speaker.

5 For example, Bangladesh went from 135 total average cases in May to 1,166 total average cases per million head of population in July and Afghanistan went from 176 to 889 total average cases per million head of population in the same period. Pacific Island countries, which had few cases in April, by July had begun to report more cases, for example Papua New Guinea went from .98 in May to 2.65 per million head of population in July (Global Health 50/50,50, 2021a). The Maldives saw the steepest increases in cases from 124 total average cases per million head of population in April to 5,292 cases total average cases per million head of population in July.

6 They survey question asked: “Have you or your organization noticed an increase in reproductive coercion?” (multiple choice).

7 In April, UNFPA estimated that, depending on the duration of lockdowns (from 3 to 12 months) and severity (low, medium and high health services disruption) between 13 million and 51 million women who otherwise would have used modern contraceptives would be unable to. As a result, they anticipate 325,000 to 15 million unintended pregnancies (3 months and 12 months of lockdown respectively) (UNFPA 2020, p.3).

8 The ILO notes that “a large proportion of women work in sectors severely affected by the crisis. Globally, almost 510 million, or 40 per cent of all employed women, work in hard-hit sectors, including accommodation and food services; wholesale and retail trade; real estate, business and administrative activities.” Over 40 per cent of women are also working in these hard-hit sectors in the Asia Pacific (ILO, 2020c)