Gender equality and COVID-19: act now before it is too late

2 years into the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that gender differences exist, and that women, men, and gender minorities are differentially impacted by the pandemic. Emmanuela Gakidou and colleagues’ Article in The Lancet provides additional data to reinforce this fact. Much of the research on the impacts of COVID-19 (outside of those whose work focuses on sex and gender differences) has focused on the direct health-related impacts of COVID-19, such as the fact that more men have been hospitalised and died from COVID-19-attributable causes than women. Still, sex and gender disaggregated data are not routinely captured and reported because of a lack of knowledge, resources, or political will. In their comprehensive review, Gakidou and colleagues searched for administrative and survey data that was disaggregated by sex or gender across publicly available datasets with information from 193 countries and found that there were major gaps in available data.

Morgan R, Pimenta DN, Rashid S. Gender equality and COVID-19: act now before it is too late. Lancet. 2022 Mar 2:S0140-6736(22)00278-1. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00278-1.