COVID-19 and its economic impact on women and women’s poverty

This case-analytical overview, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) Committee, examines the COVID-19 pandemic and how its associated economic spill over effects have impacted women differently than men in the European Union (EU). Even if gender issues have never been so high-up in the European political agenda, the effects of the COVID-19 crisis are putting in progress achieved in jeopardy in the past decades in terms on the reduction of gender inequalities in European member states.

The effects of the COVID-19 sanitary crisis have also served to highlight the need for member states to develop proactive – rather than reactive – gender mainstreaming policies. A thorough, case-analytical review of a representative sample of EU member states (i.e., Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden) depicts how the measures taken by European governments to halt the pandemic have affected women to divergent degrees and have widened the gaps to a greater extent in some member states vis-à-vis others.

Find the full study (in English) here.