{"id":13470,"date":"2026-04-15T18:13:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T16:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sciencesforgirls.com\/coup-de-coeur\/covid-19-what-the-pandemic-has-revealed-about-the-flaws-in-our-healthcare-systems-for-women\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T06:22:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T04:22:54","slug":"covid-19-what-the-pandemic-has-revealed-about-the-flaws-in-our-healthcare-systems-for-women","status":"publish","type":"coup-de-coeur","link":"https:\/\/sciencesforgirls.com\/en\/coup-de-coeur\/covid-19-what-the-pandemic-has-revealed-about-the-flaws-in-our-healthcare-systems-for-women\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19: What the pandemic has revealed about the flaws in our healthcare systems for women"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tshortcomings in our healthcare systems for women<\/span>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Introduction<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The discussion about the shortcomings of our healthcare systems for women must be amplified to include all relevant voices. Indeed, exploring these shortcomings is crucial to ensuring greater equality and appropriate care for women. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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2020 was supposed to be a historic turning point for gender equality: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, the landmark 1995 international agreement that set global goals for women’s rights. Instead, it became something else entirely: a stark reminder of the inequalities between men and women. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create these inequalities; it amplified them, made them visible, impossible to ignore. <\/p>

This article shows how the health crisis has affected women differently, in hospitals as well as at home, and why understanding these inequalities is essential to avoid reproducing them.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It is therefore essential to highlight the shortcomings of our healthcare systems for women in order to move towards genuine equality in access to care.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The shortcomings of our women’s healthcare systems became particularly evident during the pandemic. These shortcomings must be addressed to ensure greater equity in the future. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Women on the front line: an invisible commitment<\/h3>

Around the world, it is women who have kept healthcare systems afloat. Nurses, midwives, community health workers, hospital cleaning staff\u2026 <\/span>they represent 70% of healthcare workers worldwide.<\/b><\/span>. In Canada, they hold more than 80% of jobs in health care and social assistance.<\/span><\/p>

Yet, when it came to deciding how to manage the crisis, they were virtually absent. In Africa, <\/span>85% of national anti-COVID task forces were led by men<\/b><\/span>. Present in hospital corridors, invisible in decision-making rooms.<\/span><\/p>

This imbalance in representation is compounded by a concrete and dangerous problem: personal protective equipment was designed based on male body proportions.. The masks, gowns, and gloves were therefore not adapted to women’s bodies, exposing them to an increased risk of contamination in already extremely dangerous environments.<\/span><\/p>

Healthcare sacrificed: when women’s needs disappear<\/h3>

When a health system is overwhelmed, it is always the same services that are sacrificed first. <\/span>Women’s reproductive and maternal health is invariably among the first victims.<\/b><\/span> In Africa, maternal deaths have increased, births in health facilities have decreased, and access to contraceptives has collapsed in nearly half of the countries. In Latin America, <\/span>An additional 18 million women have lost access to modern contraceptives<\/b><\/span> due to the crisis. Services that allowed women to control their health have simply disappeared, without this attracting as much attention as the infection curves. <\/span><\/p>

The response from wealthy countries contrasts sharply with this reality. In the Netherlands, teams of midwives requisitioned closed hotels to provide maternal healthcare. These creative adaptations, possible in systems with sufficient resources, remained inaccessible to the majority of countries in the Global South, where healthcare systems were already fragile even before the arrival of the virus. <\/span><\/p>

The invisible work of women: an exploded burden<\/h3>

Even before the pandemic, women already devoted three times more time than men to unpaid care work. : taking care of children, the elderly, and household chores. With lockdowns, this burden exploded: schools closed, childcare services disappeared, and the responsibility fell massively on women. <\/span><\/p>

A survey conducted in 14 countries in Africa and South Asia have confirmed what many suspected: the time spent on domestic tasks had increased significantly, but their distribution between men and women had not changed. For women who also worked in essential sectors such as hospitals, grocery stores, or pharmacies, this reality was doubly exhausting: providing vital services to society during the day, and returning home to take care of household chores in the evening. <\/span><\/p>

The shadow pandemic: the explosion of domestic violence<\/b><\/h3>

Perhaps the darkest and least visible impact of the crisis is that domestic violence has exploded worldwide. From the very first lockdowns, reports of domestic violence surged in France by 30%, in Argentina by 25%, and in some countries by double. The logic was inescapable: women found themselves trapped with their abusers, cut off from their loved ones, without a private space to call for help. In Canada, one in ten women reported being very concerned about the possibility of domestic violence. Shelters, already under pressure before the crisis, were overwhelmed. <\/span><\/p>

Some countries responded. Canada released emergency funds for shelters. France provided hotel rooms for women fleeing violence. But these responses remained the exception, not the rule. In Africa, where the needs were most pressing and resources most limited, <\/span>Services dedicated to victims of sexual violence have decreased in 56% of countries during this same period.<\/p>

Digital solutions have attempted to fill this void: in China, an awareness campaign on social media; in Spain, a messaging service with geolocation; in Argentina, pharmacies transformed into safe spaces for reporting. These initiatives demonstrate genuine creativity in the face of the emergency, but they presuppose the existence of a smartphone, an internet connection, and a private space to send a message\u2014all conditions that are not universally available. <\/span><\/p>

Water, hygiene, and dignity: neglected gender inequalities<\/h3>

In low-resource countries, the pandemic has highlighted an often-ignored dimension of gender inequality: access to water and sanitation.. While frequent handwashing became the ultimate preventative measure, millions of women and girls did not have access to sufficient quantities of clean water.<\/span><\/p>

The management of menstrual hygiene has been a particularly neglected aspect of this crisis. According to <\/span>73% of respondents to the WaterAid survey<\/b><\/span> In East Africa, women and girls lacked the financial resources to manage their menstrual hygiene during the pandemic. Lockdowns also compromised their privacy, even at home. This issue, rarely mentioned in major health response plans, illustrates how women’s specific needs disappear as soon as crisis management is dominated by male perspectives. <\/span><\/p>

Teenage girls: silent victims of the pandemic<\/h3>

Among all the silent victims of the pandemic, adolescent girls occupy a special place. Data collected globally paints a worrying picture of their trajectories during and after the crisis. <\/span><\/p>

In Kenya, a study published in the British Medical Journal showed that adolescent girls who were out of school for six months were twice as likely to become pregnant and three times more likely to drop out of school permanently. than those who had graduated just before the pandemic. In South Africa, teenage pregnancies have increased by <\/span>60 %<\/b><\/span> since the start of the pandemic. These figures are not accidents: they reflect the convergence of several factors \u2014 loss of the protective environment of school, increase in domestic tasks assigned to girls, reduction in reproductive health services, and increased vulnerability to violence. <\/span><\/p>

Recent history provides further cause for concern. During the Ebola epidemic, data showed that adolescent girls were particularly vulnerable to the risk of permanent school dropout, even after the crisis ended. COVID-19 follows this pattern. For millions of girls living in poverty, in isolated rural areas, or with disabilities, <\/span>the closure of schools may have marked the end of their schooling.<\/p>

Inequalities that spare no one<\/h3>

It would be inaccurate to speak of women as a homogeneous group. The pandemic has revealed that <\/span>some women were exposed to particularly acute risks, depending on their membership in other marginalized groups.<\/p>

In Canada, Indigenous communities had already been disproportionately affected by the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. With COVID-19, Indigenous women and girls faced compounding barriers: overcrowded housing, geographic isolation, deteriorating infrastructure, limited internet access, and an increased risk of gender-based violence exacerbated by lockdown measures. Women with disabilities, unable to practice social distancing due to their reliance on caregivers, were in a particularly vulnerable position. <\/span>position of particular vulnerability<\/b><\/span>. Elderly women residing in long-term care facilities have paid a particularly heavy price during the pandemic, which has highlighted the systemic deficiencies of these institutions.<\/span><\/p>

The digital divide added a further layer of exclusion. Access to public health information, government assistance, distance education, and emergency services required a reliable internet connection and adequate equipment\u2014resources unequally distributed according to income, geography, and age. <\/span><\/p>

Rebuilding differently: a historic opportunity<\/h3>

Pandemics do not create inequalities. <\/span>They reveal them, accelerate them, and make them undeniable.<\/b><\/span> COVID-19 has shown the world what feminists, researchers, and women’s rights organizations have been saying for decades: global economies rely on invisible and unpaid female labor; health systems abandon women’s specific needs as soon as resources become scarce; gender violence is a permanent emergency, aggravated with each crisis.<\/span><\/p>

The post-pandemic economic recovery represented a historic opportunity to avoid repeating these patterns.. Several governments have taken encouraging steps: emergency funding for shelters, expanded social transfers, and support measures for informal workers. But these responses have too often been designed without systematically integrating a gender perspective, without consulting women’s organizations, and without explicitly targeting those on the margins of existing social protection systems. <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It is crucial to recognize the shortcomings of our healthcare systems for women in order to improve the working and living conditions of those who work in the healthcare field.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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