“I hope everyone realises how important a gender lens is for international studies.”

Huiyun Feng, Griffith University

“We will recover best from this pandemic if we understand how COVID-19 is impacting different populations in inequitable ways.  Gender is a major factor in differential impacts.  There is urgent need for better data on gender and COVID-19 to inform a broad range of policy responses from the local to global levels.”

Kelley Lee, Simon Fraser University

“We cannot address a problem which we don’t even bother to measure.  Too often gender is not taken into account as a variable during disease outbreaks.  This not only hides a whole host of problems; it ultimately means far less effective outbreak response.”

Kelley Lee, Simon Fraser University

“Our team is generating vital evidence which is too often overlooked.  We are rendering the hidden visible.” 

Kelley Lee, Simon Fraser University

“We need to use a gender lens to understand how COVID-19 is affecting women, men, and people of other genders differently. There are differential short- and long-term health, social, and economic effects. We need to understand these effects in order to develop appropriate gender responsive pandemic preparedness and responses which meet the unique needs of everyone.”

Rosemary Morgan, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

“During the Covid-19 pandemic, 20 of 193 countries have women heads of state and only 14 countries have cabinets where half of the ministers are women. Globally, only 25 percent of representatives in national parliaments are women. Gender equality and gender representation matters. It determines the content and focus of COVID-19 emergency laws, national task force commitments, and financial support packages”.

Sara Davies, Griffith University

“Addressing gender after the crisis – after the ‘immediate’ emergency – does not happen by accident.  Our research is informed by what we know, understand, and value as a society. Rapid research and rapid response should value addressing gender equality right now during this pandemic”.

Sara Davies, Griffith University

“While we may have less control over how the virus itself may differently affect people of different genders, we definitely have control over how the policies we design will differentially affect the genders.”

Karen Grepin, University of Hong Kong

“Pandemics expose fault-lines in our societies – we are able to see what is considered important, and by default what is not. Government’s failures to understand the secondary effects of outbreak response policy on women and other marginalised groups risks the progress the world has made to gender equality in the last decades.”

Clare Wenham, London School of Economics and Political Science