COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker

For the purpose of the tracker, gender-sensitive measures are defined as those that seek to directly address gendered risks and challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis. In the current version of the tracker, these risks include: (i) violence against women and girls, (ii) women’s economic security, and (iii) unpaid care work.

• Measures to tackle violence against women are gender-sensitive by default.
• Gender-sensitive measures that support women’s economic security include: (a) social protection measures that target women or prioritize them as the main recipients of benefits; (b) labour market measures aimed at improving women’s access to paid work and trainings; and (c) fiscal and economic measures that channel support to femaledominated sectors of the economy.
• Gender-sensitive measures that address unpaid care include: (a) social protection measures that support women and men with care responsibilities or improve services for populations with care needs; and (b) labour market measures that help female and male workers with care responsibilities to cope with the rising demand for unpaid care.

Further details are available in the methodological note here.

A COVID-19 task force is any institution (temporary or permanent) that was created by the national government to lead the response to the pandemic across any sector of public life (e.g. public health, economic recovery, enforcement). National bodies that existed prior to COVID-19 but are leading national response efforts are not included in this analysis. International or subnational task forces are also excluded. Further details can be found in the methodological note here.

If gender-sensitive measures or COVID-19 task forces for your country are missing in the tracker, it means that the tracker hasn’t identified such measures based on publicly available information. If you have this information, you are welcome to send it to covid.gender.helpdesk@undp.org.

The tracker identifies clear policy gaps in the global response to COVID-19, showing the disproportionate policy response to women’s economic security and unpaid care work. This suggests that countries need to take firm action in social protection, labour market and fiscal and economic policies to fulfil women’s needs and rights. The tracker also offers a wealth of good practices and country examples of what has been done to address gender-differentiated risks of COVID-19. This provides an evidence base on what countries can do to build forward better prioritizing gender equality in their response and recovery efforts.

The tracker a living database with more measures to be added, updated and validated across existing and new policy categories.

The tracker focuses on responses that are taken by governments and doesn’t aim to cover initiatives implemented by other stakeholders including UN agencies and non-governmental organizations. Nonetheless, measures that have been supported by the UN or other organizations are included in the tracker as long as they have been led by governments.

The tracker focuses on measures and task forces that have been established in response to COVID-19. For policy measures, these include new measures (such as cash for care) and those which have been adapted or scaled up in the COVID-19 context (such as expansion of social protection coverage, waiving of cash transfer conditionalities, or adaptation of existing services for survivors of gender-based violence to continue functioning during the pandemic). For task forces, these include new sub-committees within pre-existing public health institutions or re-activated emergency response teams.

The tracker classifies countries based on fragility status and includes relevant data where available. You can find disaggregated information on policy measures in countries in fragile and conflict-affected settings under regional analysis on the second page of the tracker.

The tracker doesn’t disaggregate data by age, region, or sector (partly due to the limited availability of such data in policy responses to COVID-19), but the tracker includes different measures that target women at different stages of the life cycle, including young girls and older women. It also includes some gender-sensitive responses taken across individual regions or sectors. This information can be found by a relevant key word search in the policy details tab of the tracker.

While the tracker focuses on measures to prevent violence against women and girls, it does include measures that also target LGBTIQ populations. This is noted in the policy details of each measure and is an aspect that can be assessed systematically in future iterations of the tracker.