The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic came to remind humanity that we continue being a deeply unequal society, underlining that the women have been who have historically been at the epicenter of these inequalities. The figures and analysis of experts and institutions have shown that it has indeed been women who have been disproportionately impacted in relation to men by the social and economic crisis caused by the Covid 19 pandemic.
The first of these effects has been the increased risk for women of being victims of gender-based violence since, according to statistics, most of it takes place in the context of the victims’ homes and the perpetrators are their couples. The mandatory confinement ordered throughout the national territory by the Government since April 14, 2020 through Decree 531, increased the risk of gender violence for women because, on the one hand, it practically forced them to a forced coexistence with potential aggressors, in a context of exacerbation of emotions and family conflicts caused by the confinement, and on the other hand, the access of women victims to essential protection and justice services, provided by the State and organizations of civil society, decreased.
When comparing the data about gender violence for the first semester of the years 2019 and 2020, there is a significant decrease in the reporting of cases during the mentioned period and in the context of the pandemic in the department of Nariño. In the case of the data provided by Legal Medicine, there is a decrease of almost half (47%) in complaints, going from 495 in 2019 to 263 complaints in 2020. The same thing happens with the figures provided by the Departmental Institute Nariño of Health (IDSN), according to which, cases of violence against women decreased from 376 to 236 cases, that is, -37% in the first half of 2019 compared to the same period of 2020[i].
Other effects with a particular level of differentiated impact on women have been those related to the socio-economic situation as a consequence of the slowdown in the economy. According to the National Department of Statistics (DANE), as a consequence of the pandemic, the participation of women in the total number of employed persons decreased by 3 percentage points, reaching 39% of the employed persons in the country in the second quarter 2020 (April-June) compared to the second quarter of 2019. The loss of jobs has been disproportionately greater for women than for men since they went from 9.2 million in the second quarter of 2019 to 6.7 in the same 2020 quarter; that is, more than 2.5 million women lost their jobs. In percentage terms, women’s employment decreased by 27%, while that of men decreased by 18%[ii].
This loss of jobs was not uniform in the economy, but there were some sectors more affected than others by the proportion of female labor that they occupied and by it nature. The number of women employed in the paid care sector rose from 2.8 million in the second quarter of 2019 to 1.8 million in the second quarter of 2020. This means that nearly one million female jobs were lost in this sector. It should be remembered that care work such as the set of human activities, paid or not, carried out in order to produce care services to meet the basic needs of third parties or for own personal use[iii].
[i] OBSERVATORIO DE GÉNERO DE NARIÑO. Cifras en Contexto 1. Violencias contra las mujeres [en línea].
<https://observatoriogenero.udenar.edu.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Cifras-en-Contexto-Vol.1-Violencias-contra-las-Mujeres.pdf> [Citado el 18 de Diciembre de 2020] p. 6 Y 7
[ii] DEPARTAMENTO NACIONAL DE ESTADÍSTICA. Informe sobre cifras de empleo y brechas de género. Cambios en el empleo en actividades de cuidado remunerado a raíz del COVID-19 [en línea].
[iii] [iii] Ibid., p. 5 y 9
