Newsletter / March 2022 / Women’s Rights in the Pandemic

We have prepared a video series to make the increasing difficulties in the lives of women during the Covid-19 pandemic more visible.

The increase in gender inequality during disasters and emergencies increases the vulnerability of women. As we have encountered in previous disasters and emergencies, the Covid-19 pandemic has made women’s lives difficult in many ways. We have faced these difficulties and inequalities both in our own lives, in our work with women using digital tools, and in international reports. We have maintained our understanding of work which we have created on the basis of gender equality, by looking at women’s rights and women’s problems from the women’s side, also during the Covid-19 pandemic. With this understanding, we made the Women’s Rights in the Pandemic video series, in which we focus on the increasing financial and emotional difficulties in women’s lives.

We created the series with short animated films in order to represent different women and to visualize situations that we cannot visually document in real life. We prepared all the films in three languages, Turkish, English and Arabic, and disseminated them in many countries. In the movie ‘Increased Workload’, we discussed the disproportionately increased workload of women at home, along with quarantine conditions, child and patient care. In the movie “Restricted Access to Women’s Health Services”, we aimed to explain that women’s access to reproductive health and sexual health services is limited due to the priority given to services related to the pandemic. In the movie “Increased Violence”, we wanted to draw attention to violence against women, especially domestic and cyber/digital violence, which we encounter in all disasters and emergencies, but increased due to the quarantine conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the movie ‘Restricted Access to Livelihoods’, we focused on the fact that women were discharged more than men during the pandemic. More job losses, especially in the service sector where women are the majority and in daily-wage jobs, severely restricted women’s access to livelihoods and economic freedom.

With the Women’s Rights in the Pandemic video series, we aimed to encourage everyone to notice these situations once again, think about them and spread them. This study was prepared with the support of the European Union Sivil Düşün Programme.