UN Women presser 29 June 2022

Good morning, everyone.

Welcome and thank you very much for being here today.

We are very excited to unveil in Geneva the report Government responses to COVID-19 Lessons on Gender Equality for a world in Turmoil, which has been jointly carried out by UN Women and UNDP.

This report analyses government's response to the crisis through gender lenses.

It highlights the gaps, good practises implemented by States and territories and looks at the factors that enabled a stronger gender sensitive response.

My name is Ariana Quinones, I am the head of the Geneva Office for UN Women and I would like to welcome Miss Laura Turquette, Policy Advisor and Deputy Chief of Research Data from UN Women, who has been leading and playing an important role in the research and will explain the key findings.

Welcome to all.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Adriana for that kind introduction and thank you to you all for being here today so that I can share the findings of this important report.

Next slide.

So at a time of overlapping the overlapping impacts of COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating climate disasters, and geopolitical conflict, all of these factors are a huge ****** to gender equality and women's rights across the globe.

And this report draws lessons from the COVID-19 response to determine what governments can do now to prevent further rollbacks and recover lost ground while enhancing resilience and preparedness for future shocks.

So the report draws on a UNDPUN Women COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker, which is a unique global data set that contains almost 5000 policy measures taken by 226 countries and territories across the world during the 1st 18 months of the pandemic.

And the report looks at how governments responded to three specific risks that the pandemic exacerbated when it came to gender equality.

So the first is violence against women and girls, the second is women's economic insecurity, and the third is rising unpaid care demands.

We found overall that governments paid insufficient attention to gender dynamics, but there were also significant cross country variations and instances of innovation that hold really important lessons for gender responsive policy making in times of crisis.

So using these variations, exploiting these variations from a research perspective from the first time, for the first time, this report provides analysis on the factors that led to a stronger gender response, generating key lessons for governments and other stakeholders.

Next slide, please.

So between, yeah, sorry, the previous one.

Yeah, the previous one.

Thank you.

So between March 2020 and August 2021, a 196 countries and territories adopted over 1600 gender sensitive measures.

Most of these measures were adopted towards the beginning of the pandemic, but as the report shows, their implementation was fraught with gaps and tensions.

More than half, about 52%, of all gender sensitive measures focused on responding to violence against women and girls.

Indeed, the policy response in this area was significant.

So 163 countries took at least one measure to adapt service provision, from new hotlines to expanded shelter capacity to the automatic extension of Protection Orders.

But important gaps remained.

So only 13 countries mainstreamed violence against women and girls into their broader COVID-19 response plans.

This included countries as diverse as Bosnia Herzegovina, Cote d'Ivoire and Nepal, which shows that political will can go a really long way in countries even with limited resources.

Looking at the response of major donors to the the the issue of violence against women and girls, we found that a very tiny 0.000.002 percent of COVID-19 response funding went towards ending gender based violence and we need to do better than that.

Next slide.

So we also found significant gaps in government responses to rising economic insecurity among women, reflecting long standing deficits.

The response to rising unpaid care demands and amid school and daycare closures was particularly weak.

Out of over 3000 social protection and labour market measures, only 13% prioritised women for receipt of support and only 7% addressed rising unpaid care demands in the form of family leaves or emergency childcare services for essential workers.

Despite the massive roll out of social protection measures, UN Women's Rapid gender assessments across 32 countries found that only 10% of women reported receiving cash relief, compared to 16% of men.

An enormous 60% of countries did not take a single measure to support unpaid care work during the pandemic, and only 30 countries launched training programmes, rehiring schemes and other active labour market policies with special provisions for women.

As a result, we continue to see very stark gender gaps in poverty and widening gender gaps in labour market in the labour market, with women's employment and earnings recovering at a much slower pace than men's.

Next slide Inequalities also persisted in women's leadership as governments rushed to to create special task forces to tackle the rapidly evolving crisis.

They relied heavily on pre-existing male dominated networks, largely excluding excluding women.

Across more than 130 countries, only 7% of task forces achieved gender parity, whilst 82% were dominated by men.

So we saw glass ceilings which restricted women's leadership, with only 18% of task forces being led by a woman, but also glass walls which confined them to certain policy areas.

So, for example, women were much better represented on public health task forces compared to economic policy Task forces, of which are stunning.

15% were exclusively staffed by men.

So it's clear that the world needs a concerted push towards gender parity in politics and public institutions at all level to ensure that women's voices and needs are adequately reflected.

So despite these massive gaps, the pandemic also triggered a significant amount of policy innovation and learning.

For the report, we specifically looked at the factors that enabled governments to mount a strong gender response.

And five key lessons emerge from that analysis, which I'll talk about now.

So one of the most important lessons of this work is that in a context of growing threats to democratic and open societies, strong democratic institutions are critical for an inclusive gender response.

So on average, countries with powerful feminist movements, stronger democracies or higher representation of women in parliaments adopted on average five more gender gender sensitive measures than countries without those features.

And that's because countries with these features tend to provide a more enabling environment for the aggregation and channelling of societal demands, including by marginalised groups, including by women, for holding decision makers to account.

The second lesson, which is related, is that women's participation and leadership across institutional spaces is a key driver of gender responsive government action.

Feminist movements and organisations provided something of an early warning system on the gender impacts of the pandemic, particularly on violence against women.

So in the first year of the pandemic and despite government restrictions, women staged at least 2711 protests demanding action on gender based violence across 100 countries.

Women's representation leadership in political office in turn was critical for translating that feminist advocacy and those protests into policy action.

As ministers, members of parliament, civil servants and local officials, women have spearheaded gender sensitive emergency measures and supported their adoption.

So from violence against women's services in Fiji and Uzbekistan, to measures for women entrepreneurs in the informal sector in Egypt, to emergency family leave for parents in Chile.

So this suggests that we need to scale up support for feminist movements and women's rights organisations so that they can continue to play that vital agenda setting, accountability and service delivery role.

At the same time, we must continue to support women's participation and leadership in politics and public office to ensure that a gender perspective permeates all efforts aimed at recovery and future preparedness.

So the third lesson is, is about the fact that countries with a more robust public services and social protection system had a head start when crisis hit.

So similarly, those that had already incorporated gender responsive elements into their social protection programmes prior to the pandemic, they were more able to activate and harness them to rapidly roll out emergency support in the context of the emergency.

It's no coincidence, for example, that most of the measures to address unpaid care work were concentrated in **** income countries in Europe and North America where that infrastructure already existed.

It's not to say that that's where the need was greatest, but it's it's where the infrastructure was already in place.

Low income countries in the global S introduced A significantly lower number of gender sensitive measures with the lack of fiscal space and resources acting as a major constraint.

But as I've mentioned, there was significant policy innovation in amid those constraints.

So for example, at least 41 countries extended social protection to informal workers, which was a long standing demand and 15 of those introduced special provisions for women in the informal economy, so often recognising women's dual breadwinner and caregiver role.

So in Liberia, for example, a new cash transfer was specifically aimed at electing women traders in open markets, and emergency support in Bangladesh included domestic workers as a key target group.

So to promote recovery and enhance resilience to future shocks, it's critical that governments build on those innovations and invest in gender responsive social protection and public services.

The 4th lesson is about digital tools and we found in our research that they were really critical for sustaining feminist activism online during the pandemic, but also to enable the rapid roll out of support.

So, more than 100 countries, including Japan, Sri Lanka and Uganda used digital tools to adapt hotlines and psychosocial support for survivors of violence.

And the use of digital tools and technologies in registration, enrolment and payment processes allowed countries to expand coverage and speed up delivery of gender sensitive social protection measures.

For example, Togo's fully digital cash transfer programme for informal workers during the pandemic reached 30,000 recipients within two days of its launch.

By 2021, women accounted for 63% of the over 800,000 recipients.

To harness digital tools for gender equality going forward, it will be crucial to close persistent gaps in access to digital and financial services, which are particularly wide in low income countries and among the most marginalised women.

With rising concerns about cyber violence against women and girls, greater regulation to protect human rights, enable collective action, and support women's full participation in in public life is also needed.

So the last lesson is about real time data.

And from our research, we found that real time data on the gender impact of crises and on what works in government response and recovery efforts is critical.

So limited limits on in person data collection triggered a rise in remote data collection and the use of non traditional data sources during the pandemic.

UN Women partnered with mobile phone operators, for example, to conduct rapid gender assessments in over 50 countries.

These and other data innovations have directly informed gender sensitive government responses across a range of countries.

So, for example, in Indonesia, Georgia and Ukraine, these data were used to advocate for new policies and additional resources to support women and girls.

So against this backdrop, strengthening the collection and use of data and evidence on gender equality and women's rights remains as important as ever.

So on that note, having summarised those five key lessons from the report, we hope that those lessons and the recommendations will be useful for policy makers, for gender equality advocates, including in the media, to make the case for centring gender in crisis response and recovery.

And I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Laura.

We would ask for participants either in the room or in Zoom to raise their hand to ask any questions.

We will also share the PowerPoint presentation after this press conference.

OK, I don't see any, any hands raised, but we will.

And we will have a briefing for delegates today at 1:00 PM.

At 3:10.

We hope to see you there as well to continue discussing the findings of this important report.

And please direct any questions to you and women.

Thank you.