Comment in the Lancet “COVID-19: the turning point for gender equality" signed by all the members of the High Level Advisory Group for the Gender and Health Hub at UN University’s International Institute of Global Health. The Advisory Group includes the heads of six UN agencies – WHO, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNWomen. It highlights the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have gone far beyond the disease itself. In addition to the increasing number of COVID-19 deaths, the pandemic has deepened social and economic inequalities; and indirect impacts have been compounded by pervasive gender inequalities. They note that “ four decades of the HIV response have revealed that approaches addressing discriminatory social and gender norms and power structures are effective in improving women's agency and sexual and reproductive health and rights”
In particular they commit to:
- reinforce and sustain our institutional capacity to deliver gender equality by increasing gender expertise in health, especially at senior levels.
- obtaining sex-disaggregated data from our programmes and member states for priority health indicators.
- continue to leverage the expertise and capacity of feminist civil society to support the design, implementation, and monitoring of health policies, programmes, and community-centred solutions and hold our institutions accountable to our commitments.
- tackle the structural determinants of gender inequality—eg, political participation and economic systems—and the intersections with other inequities. To do this effectively, we must join forces with social justice movements. Cross-movement activism had a pivotal role in the global HIV/AIDS response and ensuring access to HIV treatment in countries such as South Africa and Brazil.26 Therefore, our commitment to gender equality during this pandemic goes hand in hand with our commitment to global COVID-19 vaccine equity.
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