Happy International Women's Day!

"Even as the world is emerging from profound global health and economic crises borne of the COVID-19 pandemic, women are continuing to stand in the frontlines and to carry disproportionate burdens.

Women are making critical contributions to address the pandemic every day, as frontline responders, health professionals, caregivers, community volunteers, managers, scientists and more.

Existing trends, however, point to a rise in domestic violence during the crisis, less access to sexual and reproductive health, and an increased risk of infection and loss of livelihood for women.

In academia, we are observing a sex imbalance in the overwhelmingly male line-ups of experts speaking about COVID-19 and the poor representation of women on government pandemic advisory panels. Academic output of women was also severely impacted in this period. It seems that, the lockdown and the school and daycare closures provided men with time and space to boost their academic output, leaving women with disproportionate burden of childcare.

This year on International Women’s Day, we would like to appreciate your resilience in this difficult period. We support the theme decided by UN Women for this year’s International Women’s Day, which is, ‘Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world’".

Your WTI "Know the GAP!" Gender Team

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We at the WTI continously work to achieve and maintain long-term gender equality. Please check out our "Equality" page where you can find useful information as well as the latest programme of our "Know the GAP" Gender Lecture series. Podcasts of previous lectures can also be found there.