Latin American Countries and Women’s Rights and Needs During the Pandemic

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed  — and exacerbated — deep-seated and interlocking inequalities, with adverse impacts on women, girls and gender non-conforming people. Stay-at-home measures heighten the risks of gender-based violence as they lock women and LGBT people behind closed doors with their potential aggressors. Women have not only been at the forefront of the response as frontline healthcare workers and unpaid family caregivers, the economic downturn has also hit them harder than men. This is particularly so in Latin America, which is estimated to suffer the greatest economic contraction globally at around 7.6 percent of GDP in 2021. In this context, the gendered effects of the pandemic are threatening to erase the hard-won gains in women’s economic security of recent decades and deepen gender inequalities as economies reopen. As such, the pandemic puts Latin America countries at a critical juncture in their pursuit of gender equality.

So, what are Latin American countries doing to address women’s rights and needs during the pandemic? To put the regional response in comparative perspective, this event will present the key findings from the recently launched UNDP-UN Women COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker, which compiles and analyses over 2,500 policy measures across 206 countries and territories globally. With a focus on three critical gender-sensitive policy areas - support for unpaid care work, women’s economic security and efforts to tackle violence against women - this event will  bring together UN experts and academics from different countries to discuss the extent to which existing measures are well-suited to prevent reversals in women’s rights and ensure a socially and gender just economic recovery.

Speakers:

• Dr Constanza Tabbush, UN Women
• Dr Silke Staab, UN Women
• Dr Eleonor Faur, National University of San Martin and Institute of Economic and Social Development, Argentina
• Dr Bila Sorj, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Dr Paola Jirón, University of Chile
• Professor Maxine Molyneux, UCL Institute of the Americas
• Dr Jasmine Gideon, Birkbeck College, University of London

Chair: Professor Nicola Miller, Department of History UCL and Director of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies