The current Ebola outbreak may ultimately infect as many as 20,000 people and a disproportionate number of those cases will be women, experts say.
Since this strain of the disease first hit Guinea in May, 1,552 people have succumbed to Ebola, which has been rapidly making its way through four countries in West Africa, the Associated Press reported. More women than men are contracting the disease though, since they traditionally serve as health care workers and are the ones who are expected to look after ill family members, according to UNICEF.
Women account for 55 to 60 percent of victims who have died from Ebola in the current epidemic in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according UNICEF.
But the true numbers may be even higher. Health teams in Liberia recently reported that women made up 75 percent of victims who were infected or died from Ebola, The Washington Post reported.
The outbreak is being attributed to the consumption of infected bushmeat — the meat of wild animals — which many rely on for their livelihood and as their main source of protein, according to Irin News.
The disease spreads when there is direct contact with the blood, body fluids and tissues of infected animals or people, which is more of a risk for women who are expected to spearhead taking care of ill family members and preparing for funerals, according to UNICEF.
“Women are the caregivers — if a kid is sick, they say, ‘Go to your mom,’” Sia Nyama Koroma, first lady of Sierra Leone, told The Washington Post. “Most of the time when there is a death in the family, it’s the woman who prepares the funeral, usually an aunt or older female relative.”
Women, who are the primary caregivers in the family, are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of Ebola, which has spread largely among family members and health care workers.
A key reason this outbreak, and ones similar to it, continue to hit West Africa is because — across the board — both men and women are reluctant to seek medical care. They’ve developed strained relationships with healthcare workers and century-old traditions mandate that the ill be taken of at home, Raphael Frankfurter, executive director of Wellbody Alliance — a group that provides free healthcare in Sierra Leone — explained to the Huffington Post earlier this month.
This burden of tending to the sick, however, is the one that women have to bare.
“If a man is sick, the woman can easily bathe him but the man cannot do so,” Marpue Spear, executive director of the Women’s NGO Secretariat of Liberia, told Foreign Policy. “Traditionally, women will take care of the men as compared to them taking care of the women.”
Helping to change these perspectives is what will finally put an end to these devastating outbreaks, Frankfurter said.
Currently, because there is so much confrontation associated with the disease — the military will surround an infected person’s home and healthcare workers often don’t respect a patient’s ancient traditions — Ebola victims don’t want to seek out help from clinics.
But if these relationships could be mended and West African men and women would be more open to getting treated at clinics, then these epidemics could be stopped before they spread to this insidious level, Frankfurter believes.
The 23-year-old aid worker saw firsthand how this methodology actually works.
After a woman in Kona, Sierra Leone, tended to a funeral, she became infected and died from the disease. Wellbody Alliance then went out into the community to find the 35 people she had been in contact with and did so in a compassionate way, Frankfurter said.
Each of the 35 people willingly got tested and no one had been infected with the disease, which was an “unprecedented success,” he told the Huffington Post.
“Health workers should acknowledge, publicly, how frightening this disease will be for affected communities and how difficult it is for families to part with loved ones to likely die in isolation wards,” Frankfurter wrote in a blog for Wellbody Alliance. “Such sympathetic gestures would serve to align the priorities of communities and the public health response.”
The disproportionate impact of the Ebola outbreak on women is representative of a much larger problem: Women and children are far more likely to suffer and die in the aftermath of disease outbreaks and other global disasters.
While different epidemics impact the population in unique ways, the gender disparities documented in countries affected by West Africa’s Ebola outbreak are actually the norm in disasters across the globe. As senior gender adviser at the International Union for Conservation of Nature Rose Mwebza puts it, “whereas disasters do not discriminate against people, humans most certainly do.”
The result of our historical pattern of systemic global gender discrimination is reduced vulnerability for men. Globally, women and children are 14 times more likely to die in a disaster than men.
Understanding the role that gender plays in such crises, and in the development of solutions to these crises, is critical for the health of women and children worldwide, particularly as climate change threatens to worsen existing gender disparities, experts say.
Factors that contribute to women’s higher risk include rigid gender role expectations, gendered poverty, and the influence of ‘boy preference’ on the allotment of education, nutrition, and resources — before, during and after events. “The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters,” a 2007 report published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, describes the very significant impact of gender roles and male preference on survival rates following catastrophic events, highlighting the many vulnerabilities that women, but not men, must confront.
In many countries, including ours, women are most responsible for care work, have lower status, restricted mobility, are not well-represented in policy and reconstruction processes. They are poorer as a class and frequently face social and cultural prohibitions that inhibit their ability to respond effectively in crises. In many counties, overt boy preferences mean girls and women are less well fed and do the majority of hard labor, which makes them physically weaker in times of epidemic or climate related disaster. Already marginalized people, stigmatized by sex work, rape, sexuality, disability or illness, face greater obstacles in getting care and help.
Unfortunately, despite their major role in recovery from natural disasters and disease epidemics, women are rarely considered in the development of solutions to such problems.
In the case of Ebola, deeply understanding the role that gender construction plays in transmission and mortality could have immediate effects. Yet, as Foreign Policy’s Lauren Wolfe writes:
“When women are the primary victims of an epidemic, few are willing to recognize that this is the case, ask why, and build responses accordingly. Indeed, experts say that too little is being done to put even the small amount that is known about gender differences and infectious diseases into practice — to determine in advance of outbreaks, for instance, how understanding gender roles might help in the development of a containment or prevention strategy.”
Persistently, paternalistically, believing that men alone will find solutions to problems largely defined by their own experiences, and that everyone will benefit by benevolent extension, is the common factor underlying global disaster response, and also the reason that women continue to shoulder the brunt of the burden.
The Global Fund for Women’s “Caught in the Storm: The Impact of Natural Disasters on Women” makes several good policy guidelines and recommendation, some of which are included below. Governments and relief agencies, taking the role that gender plays in problems seriously in order to develop lasting solutions, should be:
- Recognizing the care needs of human beings with female bodies
- Increasing security measures so that women can use toilets, get water, work, go to school.
- Including women in strategizing when assessing the scope of problems and designing responses.
- Ensuring equal distribution of care, facilities, aid and other resources
- Raising the overall status of girls and women so that they are well-fed, educated and can work
- Investing in programs that challenge social attitudes leading to boy preferences and gross imbalances in care work.
While we can’t predict and prevent all future epidemics, we can change the way women are affected by them. And by doing so, we can ensure that this level of unnecessary suffering is not perpetuated even further.