Unhealthy Bias

Women healthcare workers battle everyday sexism amid the COVID-19 pandemic

- MIGITA D'CRUZ

The COVID-19 pandemic has variously been called the “great equaliser”—by the singer Madonna as well as Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York—and a “social leveller,” by the public-health historian David Rosner. The grim reality, based on data from the United Nations and the World Bank, suggests it is anything but. The infection may hit just about anybody, but the pandemic has exacerbated existing social inequalities. In India, the migrant and refugee crisis reflects this grim reality. But less obvious is how unevenly the pandemic has affected men and women. The UN now calls gender inequality the “shadow pandemic.”

India ranked 150 out of 153 countries in the health-and-survival parameter of the global gender-gap index in 2019–20. The global gender-gap means that women are less likely to have access to healthcare and control over decision-making with respect to their health. In India, until April, 76 percent of all reported COVID-19 cases were in men and 24 percent in women. By comparison, countries across the world tended to have a 50-50 split in the percentage of cases across gender. Does this mean that Indian women are peculiarly immune to the coronavirus? Probably not. It is far more likely that women simply are not reaching hospitals and getting tested as often as men.