The Policy Impact of Gender Machineries in Gender-Sensitive COVID-19 Policies

• In Event: Gender, Advocacy, and Policy

Abstract

As the conference theme details, democratic governance is currently facing a number of political threats, including democratic-backsliding and the strengthening of illiberal, populist and authoritarian political actors and leaders. Given these challenges, it is crucial that we understand the role that state institutions, especially those created to address widespread representational marginalization, can play in strengthening access and equality even in difficult contexts. In this paper, we focus on women’s policy agencies (WPAs) or gender machineries as one possible state institution with the ability to impact policy towards greater access and equality. Specifically, we analyze whether these types of bureaucratic institutions helped produce policies that explicitly addressed the gendered impacts of the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic threatened recent advances towards greater gender equality. The pandemic pushed millions of women and girls into poverty, increased their exposure to violence, decreased access to reproductive health care, endangered girl’s access to schooling, and increased the burden of unpaid reproductive labor (UNWomen). In response, international organizations, feminist activists, and women’s movements called on countries to create policies that addressed the specifically gendered impacts of the pandemic. Government responses, however, were disheartening. According to the UNDP-UN Women COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker, only 32% of all COVID-19 policies during the first 18 months of the pandemic were considered to have a “gender sensitive” component, with policies much more likely to address issues of gender-based violence than women’s economic participation or increased care-work burdens. The lack of gendered policy innovation was particularly marked in low- and middle-income countries. However, there exists a wide diversity in the absolute number of gender sensitive policies created, the percentage of gender sensitive policies in relation to all policies, and the types of issues addressed by policies. What explains this variation? What factors facilitate the creation and type of gender-sensitive policies in low- and middle-income countries?

Drawing on our own unique database of national women’s policy agencies (WPAs) and the UN data from the Gender Tracker, we provide a comparative analysis of gender sensitive policies across Latin America (LA) and the Southwest Asia and North Africa region (SWANA, colloquially the Middle East). Drawing on our country-level data, we assessed if particular features of WPAs were more strongly associated with gendered COVID-19 policy production. We coded the WPAs in LA and SWANA for four major categories. These included: 1) the location of the WPAs in the executive branch; 2) the mandate of the WPA in terms of how its goals and policy areas are defined; 3) the longevity, both in terms of how long the WPA had existed in its current form when the COVID pandemic happened and how long from when the WPA was first created; and 4) the legal founding of the WPA in terms of the legal or administrative mechanism through which it was created. These categories represent an attempt to assess the relative strength and institutionalization of a WPA.

We operate from a general expectation that if a WPA was positioned better in the bureaucracy for policy influence, had broader mandates, had longer institutional histories and legal or constitutional mandates, it would be better positioned to influence both the number of gender sensitive policies and the type of gender sensitive policy questions. Thus, we asked two broad questions: Do these four factors of women’s policy agencies increase the number of gender sensitive policies pursued by a government? Do these four factors of women’s policy agencies machinery effect the type of gender sensitive policies pursued by a government?

Two major finding emerged from out statistical analysis. First, that the longevity of WPAs as measured by when the WPAs were first created was statistically significant in terms of the total number of gendered COVID policies produced, the percentage of gendered COVID policies per total COVID policies, and some of the types of policies produced. Second, we found clear regional differences between the Middle East and Latin America in terms of both the type of policies produced and the amount of policies. We chose to compare Latin American and Middle Eastern regions given that both regions have countries that span from HIC to LIC, have differing levels of democratic governance, and different levels of women’s movements and women’s political representation. We did not find correlations between gendered COVID policies and the other WPA coded characteristics. Our findings have implications for the understanding the conditions under which women and gender equality machineries mitigate the gendered effects of a global crises and improve women’s lives whether during disaster or under normal circumstances.

Authors

• Gabriella Nassif, Global Women's Institute, George Washington University

• Gwynn Thomas, SUNY, University at Buffalo