Contributor(s): Professor Sophie Harman, Professor Naila Kabeer, Dr Gustavo Matta, Dr Clare Wenham | At this book launch, we discuss the need for gender mainstreaming in global health security.

As many news reports have made clear during COVID-19, there has been a recent sea change in thinking about the secondary effects of infectious disease control policy on women. However, we have yet to see this reflected in global health policy. When Zika made headlines in 2016, images of women cradling babies affected with microcephaly spread across the media and pulled on heartstrings. But, as this book argues, whilst this outbreak was about women and babies, it also highlighted the lack of broader gendered considerations in global health security. Taking Zika as its primary case but also touching on more recent experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, Feminist Global Health Security asks what the policy response to disease outbreaks tell us about the role of women in global health security.

Meet our speakers and chair

Sophie Harman (@DrSophieHarman) is Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, with a specific interest in global health, African Agency, film and visual methods, and gender politics. She was awarded the Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding professional achievement by a mid-career scholar by the Political Science Association (PSA) in 2018, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018, and nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer in 2019 for her feature film Pili.

Naila Kabeer (@N_Kabeer) is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development at LSE. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection and citizenship and much of her research is focused on South and South East Asia. Naila is currently involved in ERSC-DIFD Funded Research Projects on Gender and Labour Market dynamics in Bangladesh and India.

Gustavo Matta (@GustavoCMatta) is a public health Researcher at Sergio Arouca National School of Public Health at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also the Coordinator of Zika Social Sciences Network.

Clare Wenham (@clarewenham) is Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at LSE. She specialises in global health security, the politics and policy of pandemic preparedness and outbreak response. She has researched this for over a decade, through influenza, Ebola and Zika. Her research poses questions of global governance, the role of WHO and World Bank, national priorities and innovative financing for pandemic control. More recently she has been examining the role of women in epidemics and associated policy. For COVID-19, Clare is Co-Principal Investigator on a grant from the CIHR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation analysing the gendered dimensions of the outbreak.

Justin Parkhurst (@justinparkhurst) is an Associate Professor of Global Health Policy in the LSE Department of Health Policy. He is co-director of the MSc in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing programme, and the current serving Chair of the LSE Global Health Initiative. Dr Parkhurst’s research interests lie in global health politics and policy, as well as the political nature of evidence use to inform policy decisions.

More about this event

The Global Health Initiative (@LSEGlobalHealth) is a cross-departmental research platform set up to increase the coherence and visibility of Global Health research activity across the School, both internally and externally. It provides support for interdisciplinary engagement and showcases LSE’s ability to apply rigorous social science research to emerging global health challenges.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis.

You can order the book, Feminist Global Health Security, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19