Building back better? Rethinking gender and recovery in the time of COVID-19

Amid growing concerns regarding how the COVID-19 crisis is derailing the important gains made in advancing gender equality and women empowerment over the years, calls to integrate gender perspectives in ‘building back better’ from the pandemic have been heightened (Azcona et al., 2021; OHCHR, 2021). These calls are not new but have been a staple of discourses around recovery and reconstruction across different contexts marked by disaster, conflict and other forms of crises. Popularised by former US President Bill Clinton in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, ‘build back better’ has since been a normative principle adopted by the international humanitarian community (Clinton, 2006). It denotes creating a new state of normalcy: that is, rebuilding is no longer thought of as bouncing back but bouncing forward to a new and improved state. What a ‘better’ transformation looks like is of course a matter of interpretation and is highly contentious. In this article, I focus on how gender figures in imaginations of building a ‘better’ post-pandemic future.

To do so, I draw on insights from previous research on women’s experiences of post-disaster reconstruction in the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan (Alburo-Cañete, 2021a, 2021b) and highlight opportunities and challenges in achieving the transformation desired in attempts to rebuild from the pandemic, focussing on the notion of care.

Gendering recovery: who bears the burden of transformation?

It is now well-known that women ‘bear closely on overall family and community recovery’ (Enarson, 2012: 112). In recognition of this, interventions have increasingly paid attention to fostering women’s participation in recovery initiatives. This is done with the assumption that doing so would help transform gender roles, promote gender equality and facilitate women’s empowerment in the long run.

In certain cases, participation in disaster/crisis management and recovery allows women to develop new skills, have greater involvement in community affairs and decision-making, and increase their self-confidence in taking on leadership roles (see Ramalho, 2019). However, ‘participation’ can be a double-edged sword. Indeed, women’s participation in recovery does not necessarily serve gender-justice goals, especially when women are mobilised mainly as ‘efficient’ means for channelling resources to their households in times of disaster (Bradshaw, 2014). My research in the Philippines, for example, showed that while women were taking on significant roles in community recovery, recovery programmes relied on existing gender norms of female altruism for women’s mobilisation, thereby reinforcing gender roles rather than challenging them. Recovery initiatives, in other words, have a propensity to instrumentalise women’s care-based practices in service of particular visions of ‘better’ recovery. This feminisation of responsibility in community recovery (Alburo-Cañete, 2021a) may be seen as an expression of ‘women working for development’ rather than having development work for women.

This feminisation of responsibility in recovery is observable in the context of the current pandemic. While the COVID-19 pandemic has led us to place a spotlight on and applaud those who have taken on the task of caring – whether in health facilities or at home – the reality remains that care work continues to be undercompensated (if at all), devalued and performed disproportionately by women and other underprivileged groups (such as migrant workers, people of colour and the poor) (Azcona et al., 2021; UN Women, 2021). In this sense, reliance on women to take on the task of care as well as the burden of transformation ‘for the better’ needs to be rethought. The uncritical celebration of women’s care work as essential to recovery runs the risk of reinforcing unequal relations and results in the erosion of women’s time, energy and emotions. Instead of building a post-pandemic future on the backs of women, recovery efforts must be driven by an alternative ethics – one that centres care as a framework for crisis recovery rather than as a responsibility of only particular sector(s) of society.

Towards alternative ethics for building ‘better’ futures

How might approaches to crisis be transformed to support alternative and gender-just visions of the future?

The findings of my research are instructive for helping us address this question. Women’s narratives of recovery have driven home a point that the world has now begun to see, talk about and consider more seriously: that we are all vulnerable, interconnected and interdependent; and that these conditions have placed the importance, if not necessity, of care at the heart of our survival. I refer to care here not as a ‘virtuous disposition’ (often essentialised as ‘women’s role’), but as an ethic for social practice which enables us to ‘maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto and Fisher, 1990: 40). How then can ethics of care be embodied in coping with and recovering from the pandemic?

If we are serious about building a more gender-just future, then, as a starting point, there is a need to address the containment of care as ‘women’s responsibility’. During the pandemic, women have been ‘stepping up but stretched thin’ (UN Women, 2021: 38) because of the increased demand in care work alongside the need to weather economic hardships. And yet policy responses to COVID-19, especially in the Global South, have often failed to provide support to caregivers through social protection, flexible work time arrangements or carer/family leaves for both women and men (UN Women, 2021).

In addition to centring care in policy responses, it is also important to explore how crisis response and recovery can promote and sustain existing community-based care relations. From my research, women’s ability to recover from disaster rested not on technical interventions initiated by various actors but rather on the skilful navigation of everyday circumstances enabled by the presence of support networks and solidaristic formations within their communities. These care-full solidarities have played an important role in addressing hunger (see Wong, 2021, on community pantries in the Philippines), providing emotional support, as well as sharing responsibilities for care.

The implication of these insights for recovery programmes is clear: ‘building back better’ requires a reflexive approach to how the responsibility of care for the family and for the community can be better supported and fairly distributed and not mainly be understood as ‘women’s work’. Policy responses and community-based interventions, for instance, must be able to foster the value and practice of mutual care, provide resources to strengthen forms of social protection and services, as well as support community-based networks and improve work conditions and arrangements that are sensitive to the demands of care work, among others.

As we think about rebuilding things better, I find wisdom in the words of Joan Tronto (2013, p. ix): ‘nothing will get better until societies figure out how to put responsibilities for caring at the center of their democratic political agendas’ (emphasis mine).