Representation in times of crisis: Women’s executive presence and gender-sensitive policy responses to crises

Abstract

This paper shows how the gender composition of executive government impacts national responses to crises through the case study of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on descriptive accounts of women’s underrepresentation in COVID-19 decision-making I consider the causes and consequences of their (non)presence. Using data from the UN COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker, I find that: (i) across 62 countries, women average 25 per cent of members of government taskforces responding to the crisis and are siloed into advisory as opposed to decision-making positions; and, (ii) Women leaders shape who is present in policy-making, and policy outcomes. Women-led countries, although limited in number, have higher proportions of women on taskforces, especially decision-making ones. A country being woman-led has a large, although non-significant, positive effect on whether a policy response is gender-sensitive, whilst a higher proportion of women on all taskforces combined has a significant, yet small, positive effect.

Rights

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2022.2110142

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/f3a8738b-3e7d-4910-ae30-e5cf69693859