COVID-19 & Women’s Rights

We are deeply worried about the impact of COVID-19 in relation to women’s equality. WEN Wales was quick to adopt home-working for our staff and redirect our work to looking at the pandemic as it unfolded to ensure that inequalities that women were facing were captured and formed part of our lobbying work for change. Many of the inequalities between women and men that we have been discussing during the pandemic are not new – from unequal sharing of housework and childcare to survivors of violence against women living with their abusing partners. COVID-19 has brought many issues the women’s sector has campaigned on for years into the public eye, while existing inequalities have been widened.

We must strengthen our resolve to document any regression in women’s rights and our fight for gender equality for all women and ensure that the post-pandemic society does not return to a status quo that we know is discriminatory against women. Rather, we want a Wales that uses building back better principles that better align with our vision for a Wales free from gender discrimination.

Our response to COVID-19 covers three areas:

• Leading the women’s sector’s response to the crisis in terms of policy asks
• Providing accounts of lived experience to Welsh Government and other stakeholders
• Providing a forum for discussion via our #WENCafes

WEN Wales and our partners are calling for the Welsh Government’s COVID-19 response to:

• Provide high quality childcare
• Protect women from poverty
• Make women safe in their homes
• Make women safe at work
• Tackle gender health inequalities