Women’s well-being during a pandemic and its containment

Natalie Bau, Gaurav Khanna, Corinne Low, Manisha Shah, Sreyashi Sharmin and Alessandra Voena

Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic brought the dual crises of disease and the containment policies designed to mitigate it. Yet, there is little evidence on the impacts of these policies on women in lower-income countries, where there may be limited social safety nets to absorb these shocks. We conduct a large phone survey and leverage India's geographically varied containment policies to estimate the association between the pandemic and containment policies and measures of women's well-being, including mental health and food security. On aggregate, the pandemic resulted in dramatic income losses, increases in food insecurity, and declines in female mental health. While potentially crucial to stem the spread of COVID-19, the greater prevalence of containment policies is associated with increased food insecurity, particularly for women, and reduced female mental health. For surveyed women, moving from zero to average containment levels is associated with a 38% increase in the likelihood of reporting more depression, a 73% increase in reporting more exhaustion, and a 44% increase in reporting more anxiety. Women whose social position may make them more vulnerable - those with daughters and those living in female-headed households - experience even larger declines in mental health.

Keywords: 4404 Development Studies (for-2020); 44 Human Society (for-2020); Prevention (rcdc); Coronaviruses (rcdc); Social Determinants of Health (rcdc); Infectious Diseases (rcdc); Behavioral and Social Science (rcdc); Coronaviruses Disparities and At-Risk Populations (rcdc); Mental Health (rcdc); Emerging Infectious Diseases (rcdc); Clinical Research (rcdc); Women's Health (rcdc); Generic health relevance (hrcs-hc); 3 Good Health and Well Being (sdg); 2 Zero Hunger (sdg); COVID-19; India; Gender; Depression; Nutrition; COVID-19; Depression; Gender; India; Nutrition; COVID-19; Depression; gender; India; mental health; nutrition; 1402 Applied Economics (for); Development Studies (science-metrix); 3801 Applied economics (for-2020); 4404 Development studies (for-2020) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-05-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/1sp2m08k.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:agrebk:qt1sp2m08k

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series from Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().