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Pandemics and Gender—The Unequal Effects of a Pandemic on Gender Equality

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Pandemics and Ethics

Abstract

Sociocultural norms determine the identities, relationships, behavior, and social status of a person in society. Gender attributions and the corresponding social expectations are very complex, change over time and vary depending on the local context in accordance with prevailing power relations between the sexes. Regarding to gender and ethics in the context of an epidemic or pandemic, the ethical concerns are primarily about issues of equality and justice, unequal opportunities and distribution of resources, and discrimination based on gender in connection with the outbreak of an infectious disease. In general, it can be said: Inequalities and resulting gender-specific risk factors play a central role when it comes to the spread of infectious diseases and further social consequences of dealing with them (see, for example, Abramowitz et al. 2015; Harman 2016; Oertelt-Prigione 2020; United Nations Radio 2014). The resulting or increased inequalities have a negative effect on the health and well-being of affected people in terms of public health (see Raj et al. 2020).

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Correspondence to Elena Jirovsky-Platter .

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature

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Jirovsky-Platter, E., Rieder, A. (2023). Pandemics and Gender—The Unequal Effects of a Pandemic on Gender Equality. In: Reis, A., Schmidhuber, M., Frewer, A. (eds) Pandemics and Ethics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66872-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66872-6_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-66871-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-66872-6

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