Women and the Justice Divide in Asia Pacific: How can Informal and Formal Institutions Bridge the Gap?

Across Asia and the Pacific, legal pluralist systems meet both cultural norms and address injustices at the local level. What is the capacity of these pluralist systems to provide justice and mitigate discrimination against women? This article examines women's experiences across five countries to identify the factors that enable and constrain women's engagement with legal pluralist justice systems in the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on examples of women's individual and collective attempts to access justice specifically concerning custody, land, and violence, this article identifies three persistent conditions that perpetuate women's inability to access justice: the absence of gender mainstreaming resources in pluralist legal systems, most notably in rural, remote, and impoverished communities;cultural and religious preference for women's underrepresentation in decision-making;and women's low representation in justice-related civil service positions.

"Patriarchal reset" in the asia pacific during COVID-19: the impacts on women's security and rights

COVID-19 has disrupted social, economic and political life across the Asia Pacific region, with particularly deleterious impacts on women. Rather than equitably affecting all, COVID-19 has brought about a "patriarchal reset", exacerbating women's health and care labour burdens and heightening the physical violence against women and other threats to women's human rights. This paper examines global health governance in the region from a feminist political economy perspective. We ask how has the pandemic and associated lockdowns affected women's safety and access to economic resources and services on the one hand, and 'women, peace and security' (WPS) practitioners' capacity to safeguard women's rights in fragile settings on the other hand? We examine the gendered impacts of COVID-19 based on two surveys of WPS practitioners during 2020. Significant rises in domestic and gender-based violence, reduced access to reproductive health services, and increased income insecurity were all perceived and/or experienced during COVID-19 restrictions. WPS practitioners delivered services to mitigate these effects of COVID-19 despite overall less funding than before COVID-19. With the benefit of primary data, we explore how a more radical approach is needed to understand and transform gender relations in light of gender-based violence and depletion of women's labour. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Pacific Review is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

What's the ideal World Health Organization (WHO)?

The World Health Organization (WHO) is tasked with the 'attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health', yet, it is widely struggling to meet this mandate, and COVID-19 has revealed significant limitations of the organisation. Despite clear guidance provided by the institution as to how best to respond to the pathogen, many governments departed from WHO's guidance in their response efforts. Is this a new crisis for WHO? Does WHO need to restore its legitimacy in the eyes of the global community? As renewed calls for changes to WHO emerge, in this perspective we lay out the obstacles WHO face to become the WHO 'we' need. The assumption is that UN member states need an empowered and well-funded organisation. Yet, many years of discussion of reform of WHO have failed to lead to meaningful change, and glaring challenges remain in its financing, governance and politics, which are considered in turn. The reality may be that we have the WHO that UN member states need - one that can provide guidance and advice, but also take criticism for health governance failures when states want to avoid blame or responsibility. We discuss this, by analysing three key areas of WHO'S challenges: mandate and scope; structure, governance and money and domestic vs international.

Reconceptualizing successful pandemic preparedness and response: A feminist perspective.

Pandemic preparedness and COVID-19 response indicators focus on public health outcomes (such as infections, case fatalities, and vaccination rates), health system capacity, and/or the effects of the pandemic on the economy, yet this avoids more political questions regarding how responses were mobilized. Pandemic preparedness country rankings have been called into question due to their inability to predict COVID-19 response and outcomes, and COVID-19 response indicators have ignored one of the most well documented secondary effects of the pandemic - its disproportionate effects on women. This paper analyzes pandemic preparedness and response indicators from a feminist perspective to understand how indicators might consider the secondary effects of the pandemic on women and other equity deserving groups. Following a discussion of the tensions that exist between feminist methodologies and the reliance on indicators by policymakers in preparing and responding to health emergencies, we assess the strengths and weakness of current pandemic preparedness and COVID-19 response indicators. The risk with existing pandemic preparedness and response indicators is that they give only limited attention to secondary effects of pandemics and inequities in terms of who is disproportionately affected. There is an urgent need to reconceptualize what 'successful' pandemic preparedness and response entails, moving beyond epidemiological and economic measurements. We suggest how efforts to design COVID response indicators on gender inclusion could inform pandemic preparedness and associated indicators.

#WuhanDiary and #WuhanLockdown: gendered posting patterns and behaviours on Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social media can be both a source of information and misinformation during health emergencies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became a ubiquitous tool for people to communicate and represents a rich source of data researchers can use to analyse users' experiences, knowledge and sentiments. Research on social media posts during COVID-19 has identified, to date, the perpetuity of traditional gendered norms and experiences. Yet these studies are mostly based on Western social media platforms. Little is known about gendered experiences of lockdown communicated on non-Western social media platforms. Using data from Weibo, China's leading social media platform, we examine gendered user patterns and sentiment during the first wave of the pandemic between 1 January 2020 and 1 July 2020. We find that Weibo posts by self-identified women and men conformed with some gendered norms identified on other social media platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic (posting patterns and keyword usage) but not all (sentiment). This insight may be important for targeted public health messaging on social media during future health emergencies.

COVID-19, sex, and gender in China: a scoping review.

BACKGROUND: During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, states were called upon by the World Health Organization to introduce and prioritise the collection of sex-disaggregated data. The collection of sex-disaggregated data on COVID-19 testing, infection rates, hospital admissions, and deaths, when available, has informed our understanding of the biology of the infectious disease. The collection of sex-disaggregated data should also better inform our understanding of the gendered impacts that contribute to risk of exposure to COVID-19. In China, the country with the longest history of fighting the COVID-19 infection, what research was available on the gender-differential impacts of COVID-19 in the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic? METHODS: In this scoping review, we examine the first 6 months (January-June 2020) of peer-reviewed publications (n = 451) on sex and gender experiences related to COVID-19 in China. We conducted an exhaustive search of published Chinese and English language research papers on COVID-19 in mainland China. We used a COVID-19 Gender Matrix informed by the JPHIEGO gender analysis toolkit to examine and illuminate research into the gendered impacts of COVID-19 within China. RESULTS: In China, only a small portion of the COVID-19-related research focused on gender experiences and differences. Near the end of the six-month literature review period, a small number of research items emerged on women healthcare workers, women's mental health, and pregnant women's access to care. There was an absence of research on the gendered impact of COVID-19 amongst populations. There was minimal consideration of the economic, social and security factors, including gender stereotypes and expectations, that affected different populations' experiences of infection, treatment, and lockdown during the period of review. CONCLUSION: At the outset of health emergencies in China, gender research needs to be prioritised during the first stage of an outbreak to assist with evaluation of the most effective public health measures, identifying access to healthcare and social welfare barriers amongst priority communities. Gender stereotypes and gendered differences lead to different patterns of exposure and treatment. The exclusion of this knowledge in real time affects the design of effective prevention and recovery.

Using gender analysis matrixes to integrate a gender lens into infectious diseases outbreaks research.

Evidence shows that infectious disease outbreaks are not gender-neutral, meaning that women, men and gender minorities are differentially affected. This evidence affirms the need to better incorporate a gender lens into infectious disease outbreaks. Despite this evidence, there has been a historic neglect of gender-based analysis in health, including during health crises. Recognizing the lack of available evidence on gender and pandemics in early 2020 the Gender and COVID-19 project set out to use a gender analysis matrix to conduct rapid, real-time analyses while the pandemic was unfolding to examine the gendered effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. This paper reports on what a gender analysis matrix is, how it can be used to systematically conduct a gender analysis, how it was implemented within the study, ways in which the findings from the matrix were applied and built upon, and challenges encountered when using the matrix methodology.

WHO runs the world – (not) girls: gender neglect during global health emergencies

During health emergencies, neglect of gender experiences and needs can compromise the outbreak response. Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Latin America had gendered effects that were evident during the crises, yet governments and international organizations failed to prioritize a gender-inclusive response. There is the same risk that gender-inclusive responses and knowledge will continue to be neglected during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we examine the drivers of gender exclusion in health emergency response. We ask: where can we locate institutional responsibility for taking gender seriously to inform and improve sustainable disease control? The article addresses this question by turning to feminist institutional theory to explain why gender inclusion in decision-making processes is vital for effective response and post-crisis recovery. We argue that the institutional responsibility to recognize gender within the global health emergency regime lies with the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO has neglected to mainstream gender in the policies and practices that it promotes for the prevention and detection of, and response to, infectious disease outbreaks. WHO is in a position to support gender-inclusive practices, but this requires the technical agency to recognize the value of having a gender-inclusive framework to inform outbreak response, financial models, and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Feminist Journal of Politics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Response to reviews of Containing Contagion by Sara E. Davies

It was always known that implementing the IHR was going to be a long and difficult journey for many countries in the region, one pursued alongside other equally important health goals such as universal health care and vaccination coverage. The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated the cost of failing to incorporate a human rights framework as one of the essential core capacity requirements for meeting the IHR. The Asia Pacific Strategy for Emerging Infectious Diseases (APSED) was developed to assist the two regional offices member states come to grips with the capacities required under the revised IHR. I found that though there were profound differences between them, overall, ASEAN states had responded positively to the concept of shared infectious disease surveillance and the reporting of infectious disease outbreaks, both endemic and emerging diseases, to neighbouring states. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"We also deserve help during the pandemic": The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses particular challenges for migrant workers around the world. This study explores the unique experiences of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong, and how COVID-19 impacted their health and economic wellbeing. Interviews with FDWs (n = 15) and key informants (n = 3) were conducted between May and August 2020. FDWs reported a dual-country experience of the pandemic, where they expressed concerns about local transmission risks as well as worries about their family members in their home country. Changes to their current work situation included how their employers treated them, as well as their employment status. FDWs also cited blind spots in the Hong Kong policy response that also affected their experience of the pandemic, including a lack of support from the Hong Kong government. Additional support is needed to mitigate the particularly negative effects of the pandemic on FDWs.

More than a public health crisis: A feminist political economic analysis of COVID-19.

Gender norms, roles and relations differentially affect women, men, and non-binary individuals' vulnerability to disease. Outbreak response measures also have immediate and long-term gendered effects. However, gender-based analysis of outbreaks and responses is limited by lack of data and little integration of feminist analysis within global health scholarship. Recognising these barriers, this paper applies a gender matrix methodology, grounded in feminist political economy approaches, to evaluate the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and response in four case studies: China, Hong Kong, Canada, and the UK. Through a rapid scoping of documentation of the gendered effects of the outbreak, it applies the matrix framework to analyse findings, identifying common themes across the case studies: financial discrimination, crisis in care, and unequal risks and secondary effects. Results point to transnational structural conditions which put women on the front lines of the pandemic at work and at home while denying them health, economic and personal security - effects that are exacerbated where racism and other forms of discrimination intersect with gender inequities. Given that women and people living at the intersections of multiple inequities are made additionally vulnerable by pandemic responses, intersectional feminist responses should be prioritised at the beginning of any crises.

"Women are most affected by pandemics -Lessons from past outbreaks": Correction

Reports an error in "Women are most affected by pandemics -Lessons from past outbreaks" by Clare Wenham, Julia Smith, Sara E. Davies, Huiyun Feng, Karen A. Grepin, Sophie Harman, Asha Herten-Crabb and Rosemary Morgan (Nature, 2020[Jul][9], Vol 583[7815], 194-198). This Comment erroneously stated that 94 countries had reported commitments to support informal workers financially. In fact the number is 29. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2020-51434-001.) The social and economic impacts of COVID-19 fall harder on women than on men. During outbreaks of Ebola and Zika viruses in the past few years women's socio-economic security was upended, and for longer than men's. Here, we call for COVID-19 research, response and recovery efforts that are tailored to support women. The three priorities are to tackle domestic violence;ensure access to sexual- and reproductive-health services;and support women's livelihoods. Governments need to gather data and target policy to keep all citizens equally safe, sheltered and secure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

In Memoriam: Professor Aileen S P Baviera

We are greatly saddened to report the passing of one of our editorial board, Professor Aileen S. P. Baviera, who died in Manila on 21 March 2020, aged 60. She had contracted COVID-19 on a recent visit to Paris.

Why the COVID-19 response needs International Relations.

The COVID-19 pandemic affects all countries, but how governments respond is dictated by politics. Amid this, the World Health Organization (WHO) has tried to coordinate advice to states and offer ongoing management of the outbreak. Given the political drivers of COVID-19, we argue this is an important moment to advance International Relations knowledge as a necessary and distinctive method for inclusion in the WHO repertoire of knowledge inputs for epidemic control. Historical efforts to assert technical expertise over politics is redundant and outdated: the WHO has always been politicized by member states. We suggest WHO needs to embrace the politics and engage foreign policy and diplomatic expertise. We suggest practical examples of the entry points where International Relations methods can inform public health decision-making and technical policy coordination. We write this as a primer for those working in response to COVID-19 in WHO, multilateral organizations, donor financing departments, governments and international non-governmental organizations, to embrace political analysis rather than shy away from it. Coordinated political cooperation is vital to overcome COVID-19.