Engender blog

Our Bodies Our Rights in Lockdown

In this blog, Engender's Policy and Parliamentary Manager Eilidh Dickson, discusses the Our Bodies Our Rights report, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on disabled women, and our new survey developed with People First Scotland.

This month represents an anniversary nobody could have previously imagined as we mark a year since the first Covid-19 cases in Scotland and the transition into the first national lockdown on the 23rd March 2020. Even in those early weeks, Engender highlighted how Covid-19 and the public health measures necessary to save lives would impact on women, from access to decision-making to mental health of unpaid carers and frontline workers in health and social care and to increased childcare and home-schooling making it even harder for women to combine paid and reproductive work.

Women have shared their diverse but often deeply distressing stories with us through our Women Covid Scot page, all too often describing the risks of working on the frontlines; fear of careers disrupted or derailed and the toll of balancing paid work, mounting domestic work and home-schooling with limited support from employers or partners, cut off from their external support networks. UN Women has estimated that the pandemic could set back global progress on women’s rights back by 25 years.

In March 2020 Engender was also preparing to host an event at the Scottish Parliament reflecting on a year since the launch of our Our Bodies Our Rights Report which examined the barriers to disabled women's reproductive rights in Scotland. This project saw us speak with disabled women across Scotland to hear about their experiences of puberty, sex education, relationships, family planning, maternity services, parenting support and the menopause. Policy and practice across healthcare, education, justice and social care, among many other public services, was found to ignore disabled women’s needs.