The Gendered Face of COVID-19 in the Global South by Jean Grugel, Matt Barlow, Tallulah Lines, Maria Eugenia Giraudo, and Jessica Omukuti (review)

Reviewed by: The Gendered Face of COVID-19 in the Global South by Jean Grugel, Matt Barlow, Tallulah Lines, Maria Eugenia Giraudo, and Jessica Omukuti Melissa J. Buehler (bio) Jean Grugel, Matt Barlow, Tallulah Lines, Maria Eugenia Giraudo, and Jessica Omukuti's The Gendered Face of COVID-19 in the Global South: The Development, Gender and Health Nexus, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022 The Gendered Face of COVID-19 in the Global South: The Development, Gender and Health Nexus opens with a quote by Isabel Allende: "Women are disempowered constantly, and if there is a crisis of any kind—occupation, war, pandemic—the first people who suffer are women." This quote captures the heavy weight of the research undertaken by Jean Grugel, Matt Barlow, Tallulah Lines, Maria Eugenia Giraudo, and Jessica Omukuti to provide a real-time analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic response. The scholars argue that not only was this pandemic a fast-moving public health crisis, but it was also compounded by a devastating human development crisis that threatened to undermine progress made under the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals. Key to understanding the magnitude of and response to this crisis was situating gender firmly within a public health matrix dominated by state capacity failures, global governance shortcomings, economic recession, and resource scarcity. Women and girls disproportionately suffered due to policies that further limited access to healthcare and educational services, exacerbated economic conditions, and increased exposure to domestic violence. Simply put, regional and global policy advocates exchanged the safety and security of women and girls to contain the disease (and potential economic) fallout of the pandemic. Three years later, we are just now starting to understand the ramifications of these policies. The central driving question of the book focuses on the intersectionality of gender, development, and crisis to improve policy outcomes for women in a post-COVID-19 world. Feminist political economy (FPE) offers an alternative to contemporary economic theory that fails to address End Page 329 the discriminatory nature of socioeconomic and political systems in the current globalized era. By exposing "the permeability and flow between the so-called 'public' and 'private' domains, between the apparently separate worlds of policy, politics and the economy, and the world of family and relationships," FPE interrogates pervasive myths regarding women's vulnerability and choices (38). The very policies designed to protect families and the economy were in fact biased towards men, who already occupied a privileged position of power. To counter the blatant disregard of gender, FPE scholars advocate for integrative and equitable policy development that can potentially be used in future public health crisis. It is in the areas of gender-based violence and social reproduction that FPE distinguishes itself as an important theoretical lens for transcending the divide between the public and private arenas. In challenging this division, the scholars ponder whether a feminist response to COVID-19 is (or was) possible, one that advances equitable and transparent policies and can be used to "build back better for girls and women" (159). Interestingly, the scholars candidly discuss how many of the recommendations are obvious: "None of this is a surprise"; "The worst impacts of COVID-19 could have been avoided by better policy-making" (147). They also admit that policy analysts and scholars discussed the harmful gendered cost of the pandemic and advocated for substantive change that accounted for the lived conditions and experiences of women and girls. While the authors' recommendations may seem to be unsurprising, the importance of this book should not be discounted, for several reasons. First, the text offers extensive examples of how the international COVID-19 response impacted domestic policy implementation and success in South America and sub-Saharan Africa. These examples illustrate the precariousness of lived experiences of women and girls due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the text exudes a sense that we are watching the pandemic unfold in real time. Readers are instantly brought back to a not-so-distant time that was wrought with fear and uncertainty as the world attempted to navigate the pandemic. Second, this matter-of-fact approach reminds the reader that sometimes solutions are obvious. Yes, better policymaking could have improved the outcomes...