September 6, 2021
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Vol. 30 Issue 1
A gender-responsive recovery: Ensuring Women’s Decent Work and Transforming Care Provision
Gender & Development (G&D) is a unique journal, offering a forum for the sharing of experiences and analysis between feminist activists and women leaders across the globe working in research, policy, and practice. The first issue of G&D in 2022 will be a special double issue published in July 2022 which focuses on women’s work and care.
The context
The COVID-19 pandemic and policy responses to its economic fallout have significantly undermined efforts to advance women’s economic justice. One year into the pandemic, it is now widely recognized that the pandemic, associated lockdowns and other containment measures have disproportionately impacted women, especially those experiencing other intersecting inequalities on the basis of race, class, gender identity, and location, amongst other factors. (In what follows, therefore, we include those who are discriminated against by virtue of sexual or gender identity along with women, even though they are not explicitly mentioned at each point.) Women in paid employment have been more likely to lose their jobs or take unpaid leave during the pandemic to meet growing unpaid care needs at home. The economic sectors where women predominate, such as services, have been more adversely affected. Women workers (both paid and unpaid) dominate health care, but they remained under-rewarded even as they put their lives and health at greater risk during the pandemic. Women informal workers, especially in the global South, have faced employment losses, reduced wages and little or no access to social protection and other forms of state-based economic support during the pandemic. All this has occurred in a context in which women and other disadvantaged groups are already disproportionately affected by a global health crisis exacerbated by climate change shocks, environmental degradation and air pollution.
The economic and social fallout of COVID-19 has made it clear that the current global economic model is not fit for the future. There is an urgent need for an inclusive, green, and just economy which recognizes, rewards and redistributes paid and unpaid care work. The pandemic and its subsequent economic fallout have also raised critical questions about the future of women’s decent work, in a rapidly changing economic system that is increasingly digitalized and automated. There are ongoing discussions on what an inclusive global economic recovery from COVID-19 should look like and on promising policy initiatives, but there are still gaps in understanding how these transformations might be implemented and scaled up in practice.
Call for contributions
For this issue of the G&D Journal, we invite articles which drive discussion and thinking on possible solutions and ways forward in this context. We are less interested in critiques of existing economic structures and policy approaches, since these are now more widely recognized. Instead, we encourage analyses, proposals and reflections on what could be feasible and effective in resolving some of the concerns outlined above, at international, national and local levels, including through the use of case studies. Alternative proposals and ideas could present new ideas or use examples of “best practices”. Both proposals for public policy and strategies for organizing would be welcome.
Some of the themes that could be pursued include:
- Strategies to recognize, redistribute and reward unpaid care work and represent care workers;
- Different organisational approaches to the provision of care services, including cooperatives and community-based provision;
- Proposals of feminist and women’s groups to expand the public provision and financing of care;
- Specific measures to improve the wages and working conditions of frontline health care workers;
- Experiences in incentivizing government and private sector stakeholders to scale up the provision of quality care services;
- Recommendations for shifting social narratives to value women’s unpaid care work and economic rights;
- Proposals and strategies to recognize different kinds of care needs, including for mental health and for the differently-abled;
- The role of feminist organizing in various contexts, including in labor rights movements;
- Improving conditions of and empowering migrant care workers;
- Experiences and lessons learned from initiatives which advance women’s economic rights across a range of alternative economic sectors that hold potential for facilitating an inclusive global economic recovery;
- Strategies to increase women’s economic participation in decent work;
- Innovative and transformative practices and approaches to support the rights of women informal workers; and
- Any other related topics.
Submissions
G&D is a unique journal which acts as a forum for the sharing of analysis and experiences between feminist and women activists involved in research, policy and practice in the areas of development and humanitarian aid. For more information on the journal, visit: www.genderanddevelopment.org.
We want to hear from women’s rights activists, community and grassroots leaders, civil society organisations and networks, feminist economists and researchers, academics, policy makers, and development and humanitarian practitioners from all generations, identities and backgrounds who are directly involved in promoting women’s livelihoods and work in the post-COVID-19 economic recovery.
Please send your abstract of 100 words or less, in an email attachment to Gender.Development@oxfamindia.org as soon as possible and by 17 September 2021. Please include your name, contact details as well organizational affiliation, if relevant. We will contact you by late-September if we would like you to develop your abstract into a full article (of around 7,000 words plus references).
Guidelines for contributors can be found here. Please read this guidance carefully.
For more information, click here.