UTAR Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre for Social and Policy Studies (TCLC) organised an online forum titled “Rising above the Pandemic: Covid-19 and Its Effect on Women and Gender” on 12 August 2020 via ZOOM.  

Invited speakers at the forum were Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) Capacity Building Coordinator Nazreen Nizam, UTAR Faculty of Creative Industries (FCI) academic Dr Lim Soo Jin and Universiti Sains Malaysia academic Dr Premalatha Karupiah. The forum was moderated by FCI academic Dr Sharon Jacqueline Albert Wilson.

“This forum is aimed at implementing a gender-sensitive approach in response to the pandemic and the recovery phase, as well as to make these measures more effective and to ensure that no one is left behind. In many instances, women may be overburdened with unpaid work, unable to continue their learning at a distance and face growing domestic violence. In the wake of Covid-19, this forum wishes to highlight and magnify inequalities as well as discriminations faced by women and girls,” said Dr Sharon while explaining the purpose of organising this forum.

Nazreen started the session with her topic titled “Challenges faced by women and girls during the pandemic”. She focused her segment of the talk by introducing four major challenges faced by women during Covid-19 pandemic which include the economic impacts, lack of healthcare resources, unpaid care work and gender-based violence.

“Women have contributed a lot yet people tend to undervalue their contribution to society. During the fight against Covid-19, Malaysian women played a big part. Ninety per cent of nurses in Malaysia are females and many of them even work as cleaners in the healthcare facilities,” said Nazreen. She then added, “According to a statistic shown by Khazanah Research Institute 2019, nearly 64% of women spend more time than men on unpaid care work despite working almost the same number of hours as men in paid employment.”

Speaking of the economic impacts caused by Covid-19, Nazreen said, “One-quarter of our Malaysian females are from the informal employment category. Some of them are domestic helpers, tailors and others are cleaners. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, many of them were out of work.”

 “On the other hand, the family burden of women, especially for the ‘mothers at home’ has also increased during the Movement Control Order (MCO). This is because the children were out of school and the older family members at home needed intensive care,” she said.

“Moreover, when everyone was forced to stay at home, there was an increase in the numbers of gender-based violence,” Nazreen said and continued, “According to the WAO’s statistic on gender-based violence during the MCO period from March to June 2020, a total number of 2,957 cases were reported in Malaysia.”

In Dr Lim’s sharing session titled “Work and Employability of Women in various Trades”, he mentioned the need to provide protection for women who provided sexual services. He gave an insight into the difficulties encountered by this group of women especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, Dr Lim also raised some issues encountered by the enforcement authority when they were trying to prevent the spread of Covid-19. According to Dr Lim, they had difficulties in gauging the population.

Dr Premalatha Karupiah spoke on “Gender Mainstreaming and Intersectionality of Women in a Pandemic”. She began by explaining the definitions of gender mainstreaming and intersectionality, as well as their significance.  

“Gender mainstreaming is a long-term strategy or systematic institutional approach for promoting or producing gender equality as a policy outcome. It is an approach that seeks to institutionalise equality by embedding gender-sensitive practices, norms in the structures, processes, and environment of public policy. Although many countries have gender equality as a goal, they are most often blinded because they could not see the inequalities created by gender ideology that exists in the systems of the country,” Dr Premalatha explained.

“The meaning of intersectionality is varied by research context. In gender research area, intersectionality refers to a category in relation to another category. This matter usually used to criticise homogenization of the category of gender,” she said and then added, “For instance, in the-gender-ethnic-marital status, intersectionality could aggravate the problems faced by single mothers because they usually face various biases in society.”

Lastly, Dr Premalatha gave examples of gender mainstreaming and intersectionality. The examples include Doraemon’s voice; make-up while working at home—suggested by Women Ministry Malaysia; the social prejudice that “Head of the family” can only be a guy and the metaphor that refers to Covid-19 as a female because of its variability and destructive power.

The one-and-a-half-hour session ended with a discussion and Q&A session between the speakers and the participants.