Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid19 as a pandemic in March 2020, uncertainty is the only certainty that accompanies us. The pandemic has tested the health and social protection system of each country, including ours. It also tests our values as a society, which we believed to be firm, but which are shaken by fear and misinformation in the face of Covid19.
Solidarity, tolerance and respect for differences between people are diminished by xenophobia and racism that instill rumors, causing discriminatory attitudes that we have seen repeated in different parts of our geography, most of them focused on immigrants.
But this pandemic crisis has not affected all people equally. It is having and will have a more significant negative impact on those people who already had a situation of greater vulnerability: people with precarious jobs or without employment, homeless people, people with disabilities or chronic diseases, older people, migrants, etc.
The pandemic has the power to clearly visualize and magnify pre-existing inequalities. Likewise, gender inequality explains that within these groups women are more exposed to this crisis in terms of discrimination, violence and violation of rights.
Therefore, it is necessary to know the extent of the gender impact produced by the pandemic in the health, social and economic dimensions, and incorporate it into the response to a crisis that, due to its own characteristics, affects women and men differently. These characteristics, according to the data obtained so far, show us that they are:
• Overload of health work and essential services: women represent 70% of health personnel worldwide and are the majority in sectors of the food trade and hospital and residential cleaning services that are essential for the maintenance of populations.
• Centrality of care tasks: women continue to perform most of the domestic work and care of dependent people, paid and unpaid, also assuming a greater mental burden derived from it. In addition, many women are forced to not be able to continue working because they have to face care tasks when schools are closed.
• Women suffer greater precariousness and labor poverty, which places them in a worse place to face a new period of crisis (especially young women, women with low qualifications and migrant women), in addition some of the most affected sectors, such as commerce, tourism and hospitality, are highly feminized. In its latest projections, the OECD foresees that tourism has had a reduction in activity of 70%.
• Increase in gender violence and other types of violence against women derived from the confinement situation.
The COVID-19 crisis has drastically changed political and social agendas and priorities and all public policies must be reoriented to respond to these priorities. In this sense, it is essential to take into account the gender perspective, so that the measures adopted in the short, medium and long term are as effective as possible.
March 8, International Women's Day, is approaching, we need more than ever that our public institutions, city councils, councils and the Government of the Canary Islands, each within the framework of their powers, coordinate additional measures aimed at preventing, controlling and minimizing the possible negative consequences in the lives of many victims of gender violence resulting from confinement measures.
