While global health organizations increasingly are committed to promoting gender equality, their response to the COVID-19 pandemic has largely been gender-blind, a report from Global Health 50/50 finds.

Based on the 2021 Gender and Health Index, the report, Gender Equality: Flying blind in a time of crisis (79 pages, PDF), found that among the more than two hundred public-private partnerships and multilateral, bilateral, regional, philanthropic, nonprofit, faith-based, private sector, and research organizations included in the analysis, 79 percent have a stated commitment to gender equality "for the benefit of all" (58 percent) or to gender equality with a focus on empowering women and girls (21 percent), up from 75 percent in 2020. The share of organizations with specific measures in place to promote gender equality, however, remained unchanged from 2020, at 61 percent, as did the percentage of male CEOs and board chairs, at 70 percent.

The study also found that 39 percent of the organizations have adopted "gender-transformative" language — which recognizes that gender drives health inequities — in describing their core work, up from 29 percent in 2020, while 32 percent use "gender-specific" language (unchanged). Yet, despite evidence from past pandemics suggesting that public-health responses which take gender and intersectional vulnerabilities into account can improve health outcomes for all, the response to the coronavirus pandemic has largely been gender-blind. Among three hundred and forty-nine COVID-19 initiatives reported by a hundred and forty global health organizations, gender-specific or -sensitive efforts accounted for only 10 percent of those intended to provide protections for healthcare workers; 12 percent of the vaccine, diagnostics, and treatment R&D projects; 16 percent of the initiatives aimed at expanding healthcare access; 25 percent of the campaigns to promote positive health behaviors; and 39 percent of the efforts to support national surveillance programs.

Based on seventeen factors that contribute to both inequality of career opportunities and inequality in terms of who benefits — including polices aimed at advancing gender equality and diversity, transparency with respect sexual harassment policies and the gender pay gap, gender-responsiveness of programming, and sex-disaggregated monitoring and evaluation — the 2021 Gender and Health Index identified twelve top-scoring organizations: EngenderHealth; GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; International Planned Parenthood Federation; Population Services International; Save the Children; Scaling Up Nutrition; Stop TB Partnership; the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency; UN Women; Unitaid; and the United Nations Development Programme.

"The health and well-being of the people both employed and served by organizations active in global health cannot afford another year of missed opportunities," the report's authors write. "Global health actors should unite around a feminist vision where all people are valued and entitled to voice and agency in order to equitably share in the distribution of power, knowledge, and resources. People working in organizations active in global health should join forces across movements for gender, social, and climate justice, and hold each other accountable."

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