WMC News & Features

The “Gendered Face” of Ebola

As Ebola continues to spread quickly through West Africa, with more than 4,900 cases and 2,400 deaths so far, officials and health care workers need to take into account that that the virus is claiming the lives of far more women than men. “The Ebola epidemic has a gender[ed] face,” Sierra Leone’s First Lady Sia Nyama Koroma recently said. “Since the outbreak, women are more affected, as they are the primary caregivers.”

Marpue Spear, executive director of the Women’s NGO Secretariat of Liberia, echoed this idea, noting that “traditionally, women will take care of the men as compared to them taking care of the women.” According to the Liberian government, 75 percent of Ebola casualties in that country are women.

There are no known biological differences that would make women more susceptible to contracting or dying from Ebola. The primary driver of the differential impact, as indicated by Koroma and Spear, is the fact that women’s role as the primary caregivers brings them into more frequent contact with the virus. In fact, it is believed that the first person to die in the current West African outbreak was a toddler in Southeastern Guinea. The virus subsequently killed his mother, his sister, and his grandmother, showing just how easily it can spread to women who are charged with taking care of relatives.

A 2007 WHO report also confirmed that “differences in exposure between males and females have been shown to be important factors in transmission.”

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that in so many aspects of their own lives, women are denied decision-making power. Women across the continent are denied the ability to make decisions about their own reproductive health, property, policy, and finances; it’s certainly likely that in many cases, women who are infected may not be able to make their own decisions about if, how, and when they can seek treatment. The lack of female voices with the ability to influence policy, which we see in other areas of policy making, is also reflected in Ebola discussions. Informational meetings about risk communication often exclude the voices and perspectives of women, even though they are the most affected. According to the WHO report, “Women are left out of communication strategies when there is an outbreak because women may not be as active in the public sphere as men. For example, an anecdotal report by international staff during an Ebola outbreak noted that men predominated during informational meetings for outbreak control, even though women were the main caregivers for sick family members and therefore the most at risk.”

Spreading good, helpful information and keeping the public up-to-date is crucial. Public service announcements targeting female caregivers with comprehensive information on how to avoid infection may be helpful in reducing the number of women infected. Anti-Ebola campaigns by organizations such as Face Africa are raising awareness about prevention, recognizing symptoms, and what to do in suspected cases—information that is crucial to stem the number of female casualties. UN Women has also begun a campaign “specifically [to] mobilize and educate women to help curb the spread of Ebola in the region and in particular rural areas” by targeting women in their roles as caregivers and making informational materials available in local languages, as well as supporting radio discussions to combat bad information and incorrect beliefs being spread about Ebola.

Fatou Francesca Mbow, an independent humanitarian health consultant, notes that in many areas, fear and lack of information are hampering public health efforts. “At the regional level, my feeling is that [the reaction to Ebola] is very violent. People who have been infected become something to be scared of when we don’t really know how to treat it.” Liberia and Sierra Leone have both responded by deploying troops to enforce quarantines, a move that Mbow believes is misguided: “The responses that some governments have had, sending in the army, and people being left at home without food, make it seems like the battle is against the individual person instead of the virus.”

In the midst of an outbreak, it is necessary to be aware that there may be some women who would be unwilling to let their children enter quarantine without them, or who would refuse to enter quarantine themselves if they believe they’ve been infected. Despite Ebola’s alarming death toll, the fact that women are not biologically more susceptible to the virus than men may provide one reason to remain optimistic.

In the meantime, women’s voices must be heard, and the African Development Bank has committed to responding to women’s needs through prevention, treatment, and recovery, and has pledged $150 million to help regulate the crisis. The AfDB’s woman-specific Ebola strategies include training community health care workers to implement education campaigns for women, mobilizing local women’s groups to educate members, and planning mass communication campaigns with messaging specifically meant for women.

Targeted efforts like these, and the increased participation of women in policy making, will be crucial in the fight against this deadly disease. 

 


SHARE

[SHARE]

Article.DirectLink

Sign up for our Newsletter

Learn more about topics like these by signing up for Women’s Media Center’s newsletter.