As the coronavirus ravages the globe, its aftermaths have brought gender inequalities to the forefront of many conversations. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been slow to prepare for, adapt to, and mitigate the COVID-19 health crisis and its impacts on governance, economics, security, and rights. Women's physical well-being, social safety nets, and economic participation have been disproportionately affected, and with widespread shutdowns and capricious social welfare programs, women are exiting the workplace and the classroom, carrying the caregiving burden.

With feminist foregrounding, Rita Stephan's collection COVID and Gender in the Middle East gathers an impressive group of local scholars, activists, and policy experts. The book examines a range of national and localized responses to gender-specific issues around COVID's health impact and the economic fallout and resulting social vulnerabilities, including the magnified marginalization of Syrian refugees; the inequitable treatment of migrant workers in Bahrain; and the inadequate implementation of gender-based violence legislation in Morocco. An essential global resource, this book is the first to provide empirical evidence of COVID's gendered effects.

About the Author

Rita Stephan is a research fellow at North Carolina State University and the Regional Coordinator for Religious and Ethnic Minorities at USAID. She is the coeditor of Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring and "In Line with the Divine": The Struggle for Gender Equality in Lebanon.

Reviews
For a fresh take on the pandemic's impact on gender relations in the MENA region, this book is a must-read. Scholars of public health, gender, and/or the MENA region will find much of the research gathered in this volume rich and valuable. (H-Net Reviews (H-Sci-Med-Tech)) 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. (Abu Aardvark's MENA Academy)



Book Information
ISBN 9781477326527
Author Rita Stephan
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of Texas Press
Publisher University of Texas Press
Weight(grams) 626g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm