Gender and COVID in the Middle East
An important new book sheds light on the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women
Rita Stephan (ed.), COVID and Gender in the Middle East (University of Texas Press, 2023)
There’s been remarkably little research on the political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the MENA region. I’ve had a regular Google Scholar alert for research on COVID and politics in the Middle East since early 2020, with surprisingly little to show for it. Shortly after the pandemic shut things down, I organized a POMEPS zoom workshop - one of the first of what would become regrettably many such online gatherings - which led to one of the first publications on Covid in the Middle East, with 21 short essays by scholars from across the region.
Two years later, we published a follow-up collection, with fifteen new short papers and my framing essay assessing what we had learned with experience and more explicitly building out some tentative theoretical conclusions about state capacity, profound inequalities in access to vaccines and treatment, the flows of information and misinformation, and the exploitation of lockdowns by authoritarian regimes to break protest movements (or, in the case of Tunisia’s Kais Saied, taken the opportunity to overturn democracy and establish one-man rule).
One theme which emerged especially powerfully in that second collection was that the impact of COVID was profoundly gendered:
Women disproportionately found themselves losing jobs and educational opportunities as lockdowns and the demands of care forced them back into the homes. They suffered dramatic increases in domestic violence and abuse. Palestinian female college students from marginal communities in Israel struggled with the shift to online education, as Meler shows in her contribution. Youssef and Yerkes report a five-fold increase in gender based domestic violence in the first year of Tunisia’s lockdown. Rita Stephan documents the disproportionate effects of COVID on women’s employment, healthcare, and access to information. At the same time, as Youakim and Abdallah stress, those women who did continue working were disproportionately “on the frontline of the pandemic response, primarily working in healthcare and social services, and taking on a significant increased amount of unpaid carework.”
I was therefore delighted to see the publication of Rita Stephan’s critically important, groundbreaking edited volume COVID and Gender in the Middle East. Stephan brings together fifteen original chapters, mostly written by women from the MENA region, focused on the many profoundly gendered effects of the pandemic and its politics. (Some of the authors contributed to my POMEPS Studies special issue, but most didn’t.) I spoke with Stephan and Maro Youssef, a key contributor to the collection, for this week’s Middle East Political Science podcast — keep an ear out for that fascinating conversation on Friday.
The authors range from academics to practitioners across a number of disciplines, each bringing a distinctive and often personally informed perspective to the pandemic. All work through the lens of gender, demonstrating in practice the value of a feminist approach to the region’s politics and institutions. Taken together, they offer a searing portrait of the gendered impact of the pandemic, with women bearing the brunt of economic dislocation, interruptions to education, the uneven burden of care for children and the elderly, domestic violence and abuse, exposure to the virus through their role as caregivers and nurses, and more. Those effects, Stephan emphasizes, have endured well beyond our collective decision to pretend the pandemic is over.
Several key themes run through the diverse set of essays. One is the profound variation across subregion and social class. Citizen women in many of the wealthy Gulf states did quite well, all things considered, given the ability of those well-resourced and highly competent states to cushion the dislocation. Their relative comfort, though, rested on the backs of an army of migrant female labor, who enjoyed no such protections and were unable to leave as they cared for the children and homes they served (and suffered sexual violence and abuse commensurate with that experienced by so many women under lockdown conditions).
Women in the region’s less wealthy, fragile states had far fewer social protections or state support. Here, contributors document a sobering array of economic and educational setbacks for women trapped in overcrowded houses without the space, privacy or capacity to continue their studies or their work. Women’s participation in the workforce cratered, they suggest, with little sign of recovery in the post-pandemic period. The horrific impact of the dramatic increase in gender based violence and domestic abuse was often compounded by the closures of the kinds of social welfare institutions (shelters, hotlines, support groups, etc) which might have ordinarily mediated their suffering. The authors are crystal clear that this is not something limited to the Middle East and should not be taken as some kind of essentializing statement on Arab or Muslim cultures: these are global patterns and problems, and should be understood and addressed as such.
For the academics reading this, there’s a chapter by Marwa Shalaby, Nermin Allam, and Gail Buttorff documenting the pandemic’s profound impact on scholarship by women (for an earlier version of their findings, see their article in PS and this contribution to the MENA Politics Newsletter). There’s no question that these effects will have profound downstream effects on hiring, promotion, tenure, and career trajectories. Their results are well in line with findings from across academia (see this new study of publishing in medical journals, for instance, which found that “of the three million submissions to major health and medical journals in the first half of 2020, just 36% were from women.”). That’s in line with results of our questions about COVID in the Middle East Scholars Barometer last fall documenting clear patterns of gendered impact on publishing and extremely limited institutional support for things like child care during school closures:
COVID and Gender in the Middle East is a genuinely important contribution to a critical topic which has not received the attention it merits. It should force us all to think through the pandemic not only as a political and economic event, or as a public health challenge, but as a highly gendered social, political, and economic intervention. Their gendered lens lets us see more clearly holes in state capacity, with weak medical sectors and decrepit public health institutions so clearly observable in women’s access to health care. The gendered lens pushes us to understand effects across levels of analysis, to look inside the household as much as we look at formal political institutions or civil society. This collection should provoke a lot of thought and open up many avenues for future research.