Introduction

In this chapter, we examine what taking a gendered approach to the multifaceted crisis of COVID-19 means and why it is important to do so. Gender can be understood as a complex process of social construction of identities which we perform (Butler, 2006) along a spectrum where male and female are just two (binary) identities (Mazur and Goetz, 2010). It is also an ‘analytic category’ (Waylen, 1997: 206) that provides a lens to look at policy, institutions, education, health, welfare and the global economy, as well as the so-called ‘private sphere’ of family, relationships and community, and the interactions between them.

As Peterson (2005: 500) observes, the discussion of women has come in recent years to occupy a greater space in mainstream debates about development, but often in an uncritical manner where women are ‘ “added” to prevailing analyses’, without any systematic probing of why or how the global political economy creates and reinforces the marginalization of women, girls and other groups. Taking a gendered approach to development is very different to simply adding women in. Feminist political economy challenges mainstream ways of interpreting social phenomena and, by extension, promotes equitable policy responses that work for women and girls. Such an approach recognizes that embedded male biases and gender blindness exist within global development and, if not addressed, lead to poor outcomes that accentuate gender-based inequalities, even if policies are well-intentioned. As a result, feminists have consistently called for the concepts and tools for understanding both policy and the social world to be gendered in ways that acknowledge the complexity and intersectionality of gender (Mazur and Goetz, 2010), tackle the often invisibility of gender in policy and outcomes, and stop the reproduction of gendered disadvantage.

We begin by explaining the relationship between gender, intersectionality and development. We elaborate briefly on what we understand by the term ‘women’ and why we have chosen to focus on women and girls as an empirical category in this book. Next, we situate the COVID-19 crisis in the longer trajectory of gender and development, identifying continuities in conceptualizations and approaches to gender in COVID-19 policy, especially with regards to who and what is in/ visibilized.