- From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, how it affected and continues to affect women, girls, men, boys, and non-binary gender groups are complex and evolving
- Apart from the direct effects of COVID-19 illness, pandemic responses also amplified existing gender inequalities across multiple dimensions
- We need your voice and comments to shape a collaborative and shared global research agenda for gender and COVID-19
You can access the brief in the following additional languages:

…as the world steps into the second year of the COVID-19 crises, we need to hasten gender-focused research for future-oriented action and the long-term recovery from the health and socio-economic consequences of the pandemic.
Collaboratively undertaking an inclusive research agenda-setting process aims to increase the responsiveness and ownership of the evidence generated. This is critical for collectively advancing strategic and evidence-informed COVID-19 actions, including wide-ranging gender interventions at scale within and beyond the health sector. The United Nations University International Institute for Global Health is implementing this collaborative health research agenda-setting exercise, as part of its Gender and Health Hub’s inaugural scope of work.
The aims of the research agenda-setting exercise are to:
- Harness current momentum on gender equality to support policy and programming-relevant research and accountability
- Identify a shared and prioritised research agenda and framework for evidence-informed action to address gender and intersectionality in the global health and intersectoral COVID-19 response.
- Facilitate feminist solidarity in understanding, voice, and action from multiple communities of stakeholders.
Responding to recent calls for a feminist-oriented focus (10) and decolonizing processes in global health,(11,12) we are integrating feminist research values (10,13) and a decolonizing focus (14–16) within this research agenda-setting process. The process is co-developed through real-time learning, and open calls to a broad range of stakeholders to comment and contribute to the process design, scope and content.
The group conversations and collective contributions to draft research reports and questions for prioritisation are now live on a community discussion board (www.ghhbuzzboard.org). We are calling for different stakeholder groups, including community and civil society members, donors, policy-makers, practitioners, product developers, media, clinicians, students, and of course, researchers to participate in this exercise so that we get a rich and diverse view of the research needs. Participants are invited to contribute insights, idea, suggestions for prioritised research questions across five thematic areas and strategies to support the implementation and impact of the research agenda.
The output of the exercise will be a shared research agenda that can be utilised by researchers, funders, and policy-makers to guide COVID-19 research investments and corresponding programming and policy actions by the health sector. Participants will be invited to comment on the draft before it is published publicly.
We are calling for different stakeholder groups, including community and civil society members, donors, policy-makers, practitioners, product developers, media, clinicians, students, and of course, researchers to participate in this exercise so that we get a rich and diverse view of the research needs.
Each of our lived identities and professional roles as stakeholders in the pandemic response brings unique insights into the pandemic. We hope that you can share these with all the participants who are contributing to shaping the agenda.
Please visit www.ghhbuzzboard.org to post your insights, ideas, and suggestions for priority-research on the gendered dimensions of COVID-19 across any of the five thematic areas you are interested in.

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- Gender and COVID19 Working Group. Gender & Covid-19 Working Group. Gend. Covid-19. 2020. https://www.genderandcovid-19.org/gender-working-group-page/ (accessed Jan 19, 2021).
- Davies SE, Harman S, Manjoo R, Tanyag M, Wenham C. Why it must be a feminist global health agenda. The Lancet 2019; 393: 601–3.
- Büyüm AM, Kenney C, Koris A, Mkumba L, Raveendran Y. Decolonising global health: if not now, when? BMJ Glob Health 2020; 5: e003394.
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