Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s livelihoods, migration, feminization of poverty, and its effects on women’s health and well-being.

Paper abstract:

This presentation examines the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s precarious livelihoods and well-being in Uzbekistan. The feminist analysis aims to examine the gendered nature of the pandemic and its social and economic outcomes by looking at the unequal distribution of pandemic risks. Viewing these conditions through a conceptual feminist framework and lenses of empowerment helps to understand the differential impact of the pandemic on women’s sense of agency and outcomes, given that women in particular experience multiple inequities and hence heightened precarity in the economy.

Based on emerging research on the effects of the pandemic, the author analyzes precarious gendered livelihoods, migration and motherhood, feminization of poverty, the effects on women’s health and well-being, and the rise in domestic violence. Women often experience and are subject to: 1) working in low-wage sectors and having low income, expenditures and food security, 2) physical hazards as elements of precarity, 3) increased domestic work and caregiving, 4) poor access to education, property rights and representation at all levels of the society, 5) diminished social networks and welfare and 6) emotional distress, anxiety, and domestic violence. I argue that under COVID-19, the economy deepened the precarity of labor and further intensified gender inequalities and intersectional vulnerabilities.