COVID-19 and Gender Equity in Education

• In Event: Equitable Education for Women and Girls: Global Challenges and Local Solutions

Abstract

Covid-19 is not gender neutral as evidence from previous worldwide outbreaks like Covid-19 indicated that women and girls can face more negative impacts than men, and risks exist for gender gaps to widen during and after pandemics and gains in women’s and girl’s rights built over the past decades could be reversed (World Bank, 2020a & 2020b). While every country around the world is struggling to contain the spread of Covid-19 and its impact, the World Bank gender group and researchers have been working to ensure that responses to COVID-19 consider the pandemic's different impacts on men and women (World Bank, 2020b).
Recent studies show that Covid-19 could infect everyone, but it does not affect everyone the same way. Results from a preliminary study (World Bank, 2021a) reported that the pandemic has worsened the existing gender gaps and made life harder for women in Croatia, which is especially heightened for women from vulnerable social groups, including lower-skilled, rural, inactive, and elderly women. A study on small business worldwide (Goldstein, et al., 2020c) showed that globally female-owned businesses were 5.9 percentage points more likely to have closed their businesses than male-owned businesses; and “male- and female-owned businesses are impacted differently by lockdown policies and measures of support being put in place to help businesses weather this crisis” (Goldstein, et al., 2020c. par. 17).
The current study aims to examine how Covide-19 has affected gender equity in education. Nguyen, et al. (2020) used the Gender Gap Index (GGI) from the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (GGGR) (2006–2017) and analyzed the trends in gender equity and the historical and contextual factors that contributed to changes in gender equity in China, Nepal and Nicaragua. The researchers, building on the work by Nguyen, et al. (2020) and using the GGI from the World Economic Forum’s GGGR from 2018 to 2021, intend to explore how the social, economic, and political changes resulted from Covid-19 have affected gender equity in education in the world, and how access to education has affected women’s and girl’s education attainment. GGGR 2020 (World Economic Forum, 2020) reveals that gender parity will be attained in 99.5 years worldwide while GGGR 2021 (World Economic Forum, 2021) states that as the impact of the Covid-19 continues to be felt, closing the global gender gap has been increased to 135.6 years from its 2020 prediction of 99.5 years (World Economic Forum, 2020).
This study will use the interrupted time-series analysis design to dive deeper into the data to identify the trends of gender equity in education, and to analyze what contributed to countries that have done better than the others in terms of gender equity in education during the pandemic. The researchers hope to provide the audience with information on how educators and policy makers could work together to advance human rights and promote gender equity in education during crises like Covid-19.

Authors

• Guofang Wan, Loyola University Chicago

• Yi-Lung Kuo, BNU-HKBU United International College