Are the Interests of Women Included in Times of Crisis? : A comparative study of the substantive representation of women during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Southern African Region

Abstract: This study set out to answer how and to what extent the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are addressed in parliamentary debates in the Southern African regional context. As both the proportion of women in parliament and the level of democracy have been established by previous research as important conditions for women to be able to act for women as a group, four countries with varying combinations of these factors are examined. By conducting both a quantitative and a qualitative text analysis on Hansards from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, the study analyses the extent to which the gendered effects of the pandemic are addressed and how they are addressed respectively. The results reveal that a combination of a high proportion of women in parliament and a high degree of democracy is the most favourable condition for enabling the substantive representation of women. A democracy with a low proportion of women in parliament is shown to be more allowing for the substantive representation of women than an electoral autocracy with a high proportion of women in parliament. Moreover, the qualitative frame analysis sheds light on the different issues which are in focus on the framing of the gendered effects of the pandemic in different parliaments depending on their level of democracy. Particularly, the issue of gender-based violence in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is found to have reached the political agenda in the democratic cases, whereas MPs in the less democratic parliaments are more likely to feminize their cause by focusing more on traditionally feminine policy issues such as the health effects of women within the context of the pandemic.