A distraction from the biggest public health challenge we have faced in a century: six problems with scrapping PHE

Clare Wenham outlines six reasons why abolishing Public Health England in the middle of a lethal pandemic poses real and serious problems. She writes that ultimately, Public Health England provides a convenient scapegoat for the government’s many failures in responding to COVID-19

Clare Wenham: women have been largely ignored in the COVID-19 response. This must change

Every Thursday the UK is encouraged to ‘clap for carers’ – who are far more likely to be women. Yet the government has not considered how measures such as furlough and school closures affect women disproportionately, and there is an absence of female representation at the top of government and in the COVID-19 working group. Clare Wenham (LSE) says that this needs to change as it develops an exit strategy

Too exhausted even to watch the news: a plea for COVID-19 policy that considers women

Our experience of the first lockdown tells us that Lockdown 3.0 will disproportionately affect women. Clare Wenham (LSE) looks at the extent of the harm and suggests what the government could do right now to mitigate the impact. Closing schools means parents must take over childcare and homeschooling, and during the first UK lockdown women ... Continue

Understanding and mitigating real-time differential gendered effects of the Covid-19 outbreak

The impact of disease on individuals and communities is not homogenous, with women disproportionately infected and affected. However, public health efforts to effectively contain an outbreak, and mitigate its secondary impacts, remain hindered by a lack of real-time gender analysis. Gender analysis considers how women and men experience health crises and responses differently based on biological factors, social roles and power inequities. Gender inequities have been highlighted in past outbreaks, but the few analyses have been undertaken post-crisis without being able to offer real-time evidence to strengthen the public health response. COVID-19 appears to reproduce this gendered neglect: with no systematic gender-analysis of the outbreak by global health institutions or governments in affected countries (or in those preparing for the outbreak). Rather than waiting for a lessons-learned review to establish these gaps, we are undertaking a real-time, multi-faceted gender analysis of preparedness and response mechanisms, providing immediate evidence to inform public health response

Covid-19 in El Salvador: safeguarding public health or restricting human rights?

Covid-19 in El Salvador has created a serious tension between public health and social control. Recent interventions may reduce disease transmission, but they come with significant costs for social cohesion. Measures introduced to contain the spread of the virus have also left politically and economically marginalised groups vulnerable to human rights violations, write Amaral Arévalo (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) and Clare Wenham (LSE Health Policy)

WHO runs the world – (not) girls: gender neglect during global health emergencies

During health emergencies, neglect of gender experiences and needs can compromise the outbreak response. Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Latin America had gendered effects that were evident during the crises, yet governments and international organisations failed to prioritise a gender inclusive response. There is the same risk of neglecting gender inclusive response and knowledge during COVID-19. In this article we examine the consequence of gender exclusion in health emergency response. We ask where can we locate institutional responsibility to take gender seriously to inform and improve sustainable disease control? This article seeks to address this question by turning to feminist institutional theory to explain why gender inclusion in decision making processes is vital for effective response and post-crisis recovery. We argue that the institutional responsibility to recognise gender within the global health emergency regime lies with World Health Organization (WHO). WHO has neglected to mainstream gender into the policies and practice which they promote for the prevention, detection and response of infectious disease outbreaks. WHO is in a position to support gender inclusion practices but it requires the technical agency to recognise the value of gender inclusion framework to inform outbreak response, financial models, and recovery

Why we need a gender advisor on SAGE

The UK government has largely failed to consider gender in its COVID-19 response, despite the many and varied differential impacts of policy interventions on women and men. Since government policy is informed by the advice ministers receive, we sought to understand whether and how gender had been considered by the UK government’s COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE). This paper uses two forms of policy analysis to assess 73 SAGE meeting minutes and background documents for 1) the explicit references to sex and/or gender, and 2) references to issues evidenced in the literature to be gendered, to understand whether the gendered implications of policy were considered. We find that the acknowledgement of the gendered dynamics of particular issues, such as school closures and feminised (or masculinised) employment sectors, were largely absent in SAGE meeting minutes and that explicit references to women were largely of a biological (sex) nature, rather than social (gender). Over time we saw increased references to the gendered impacts of policy in meeting background documents, though these references largely reproduced gendered stereotypes and roles rather than actively engaging with the gender issues. However, not all blame can be put at the feet of SAGE members, who did show awareness of equity issues and were predominantly epidemiologists and behavioural scientists likely untrained in gender analysis. SAGE members are selected based on the government’s framing of the type of emergency at hand, and COVID-19 has been treated by the government as a an epidemiological emergency, rather than a social, political and economic one. We argue that reframing emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic in a more holistic way enables us to redefine the scientific advice deemed necessary for SAGE membership, and facilitates the inclusion of gender advisors to mitigate the downstream gendered impacts of nonpharmaceutical interventions associated with the government’s COVID-19 response