Intended for healthcare professionals

  1. News & Views
  2. Covid-19 is an...
  3. Covid-19 is an opportunity for gender equality within the workplace and at home
Views And Reviews

Covid-19 is an opportunity for gender equality within the workplace and at home

BMJ 2020; 369 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1546 (Published 20 April 2020) Cite this as: BMJ 2020;369:m1546

Read our latest coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
  1. Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy1,
  2. Julia Smith, research associate2,
  3. Rosemary Morgan, assistant scientist3
  1. 1London School of Economics, UK
  2. 2Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada
  3. 3Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
  1. C.Wenham{at}lse.ac.uk
    Follow Clare Wenham on Twitter @clarewenham
  2. Follow Julia Smith on Twitter @juliaheather
  3. Follow Rosemary Morgan on Twitter @rosemaryjmorgan

Could covid-19 help unravel gender norms?

Anneliese Dodds was giving her first interview as the UK’s shadow chancellor on 6 April when her young daughter gate crashed the video call. The TV presenter resolutely responded, “She’s welcome any time on this programme.” This contrasts with the widely shared clip of political analyst Robert E Kelly, whose daughter, in 2017, interrupted a live interview with the BBC. Kelly’s wife quickly ran in to retrieve the child, and a Twitter storm over gendered domestic care roles followed. But we now live in a different world: whereas Kelly found global notoriety in 2017, thanks to covid-19 child sightings are becoming common and a whole world of domestic responsibilities and burdens are obvious through video links into people’s homes.

We have written elsewhere about the gendered impact of covid-19, and we are leading a project to collect evidence of these differential experiences. We know that women represent most of the healthcare workforce globally, and if we …

View Full Text
Back to top