Linda C. McClain is the Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law and co-director of the BU Program in Reproductive Justice. Her areas of interest include family law, gender and law, feminist legal theory, civil rights, and law and literature. Among her books are Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts Over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (2020), Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (2013) with James E. Fleming, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (2006), and the co-authored Contemporary Family Law (6th ed. 2023).Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health Law at the Boston University School of Law and co-director of the BU Program on Reproductive Justice. Her work focuses on the interactions between law, science, and politics with a focus on gender and health. She is the author of the forthcoming book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS. Professor Ahmed is on the board of Our Bodies, Our Selves and the advisory board of the Lawyering Project. She has previously served on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

"Arundhati Roy famously urged us to use the pandemic as a portal to a more just future. This powerful collection reveals the gendered paradoxes of COVID—from intersectional, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives— uncovering alarming insights and offering thoughtful solutions that call for a new ethics, politics, and law of care, community, and connection, even while our pandemics of inequality, poverty, and disinformation continue to rage."Catherine Powell, Eunice Carter Distinguished Research Scholar Professor of Law, Fordham Law School"In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, out of “all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” Those words were prescient and surfaced powerfully during the triple pandemics of COVID-19, systemic racism, and sexism – with both the “color and gender of COVID-19” on vivid display. This essential volume allows us to understand the intersectional way that gendered and raced effects operate using the “pandemic as a portal” to expose how COVID-19 exacerbates preexisting disparities and amplifies their disparate impact. This insightful book helps us to consider more fully how to rectify health inequities."Matiangai Sirleaf, Nathan Patz Professor of Law, University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law“This volume exemplifies how sex and gender influence health through an important, unique set of multidisciplinary, multi-country analyses. While the effects of COVID-19 are acute in our memory—and continue to surface in everyday life—this volume provides us with analytical approaches that should inform policy and research for years to come. As the pieces from India illustrate, public health understanding or action is incomplete without incisive analyses of the legal, economic and social forces that shape it.”Sapna Desai, Senior Fellow, Population Council Institute, India; Member, India Task Force of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19"The Routledge Companion to Gender and Covid is a timely volume which helps readers to reflect on government responses and recovery initiatives. It discusses the possibilities and challenges of policies and responses that serve as a resource for dealing with future pandemics. It is a must-read for policymakers and researchers who are working on gender, health and reproductive health, law and diseases."Melody Kshetrimayum, FLAME University, Pune, India

• PART I. TRAINING A GENDER LENS ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC 1. Introduction to Researching Gender and COVID-19 2. Law as a Determinant of Health: COVID-19 & Gender 3. Health Justice: Feminism, Universalism, and Vulnerability in Pandemic Response 4. We Are Not in This Together: Toward a Feminist Public Finance PART II. FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES 5. Gender, COVID, and Care 6. Pandemics, Privatization, and Public Education 7. Pandemic Impact and Women’s Resilience in China 8. Mind the Gap: The Promise and Perils of Technology and Courts During COVID-19 Naomi M. Mann 9. Lessons from Pandemic Co-Parenting: Toward Family Mediation that Centers Low-Income, Never-Married Black Mothers 10. Queer Inequality: The COVID-19 Spotlight PART III. ECONOMY, LABOR, AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION 11. Care and Economic Crisis 12. COVID-19 and Vulnerable Groups: Experiences of Sexual Minorities in Barbados 13. Does the EU COVID-19 Recovery Plan Care About Care? 14. The Resilience of Gender Equality: How COVID-19 Was Gendered in Norway 15. Manufacturing Crisis, Exacerbating Vulnerabilities: A Feminist Perspective on Crisis, Calamity, and the Political Economy of Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic 16. COVID-19 She-Cession: The Employment Penalty of Childcare 17. After the “Shecession”: Post-Pandemic Law and Policy for Working Mothers 18. Gender Inequality and the Increase of Unpaid Care Work in Mexico During the COVID-19 Pandemic PART IV. HEALTH 19. HIV Activism’s Lessons for Fighting COVID 20. Masculinity, Partisanship, and Responses to COVID-19 in the U.S. 21. Gendered Effects of U.S. Pandemic Border Policy on Migrants From Central America 22. Gender and Human Rights in the Context of COVID-19 23. Lockdowns, Gender, and Health PART V. REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH 24. The Resilience of Reproductive Rights 25. Reproductive Justice for Disabled People During COVID-19 and Beyond 26. The Shift of Medication Abortion Care Delivery Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on the Future of Sexual and Reproductive Health in the United States 27. Abortion Access in a Post-COVID and Post-Roe World 28. Religious Exemptions and Gender Equality in a Pandemic 29. Impact of COVID-19 on the Reproductive Rights of Marginalized Women in India 30. Access to Abortion During Covid-19 in India: Gaps and Challenges PART VI. POLITICS AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 31. Sharing is Caring: Women of Color California State Legislators Take to Facebook During COVID-19 Lockdowns as a Form of Constituent Services 32. Women’s Leadership is Associated with Few COVID-19 Deaths and Better Communication 33. Leadership in the Lands Down Under? A Comparative Print Media Analysis of the Morrison and Ardern Government COVID-19 Responses 34. The Gendered Effects of Covid in Colombia: Looking Beyond the Numbers 35. COVID-19, International Trade Law and the Gendered Dimensions of the Global Vaccine Apartheid: A Rights-Based Analysis

Linda C. McClain is the Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law and co-director of the BU Program in Reproductive Justice. Her areas of interest include family law, gender and law, feminist legal theory, civil rights, and law and literature. Among her books are Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts Over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (2020), Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (2013) with James E. Fleming, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (2006), and the co-authored Contemporary Family Law (6th ed. 2023).Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health Law at the Boston University School of Law and co-director of the BU Program on Reproductive Justice. Her work focuses on the interactions between law, science, and politics with a focus on gender and health. She is the author of the forthcoming book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS. Professor Ahmed is on the board of Our Bodies, Our Selves and the advisory board of the Lawyering Project. She has previously served on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

"Arundhati Roy famously urged us to use the pandemic as a portal to a more just future. This powerful collection reveals the gendered paradoxes of COVID—from intersectional, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives— uncovering alarming insights and offering thoughtful solutions that call for a new ethics, politics, and law of care, community, and connection, even while our pandemics of inequality, poverty, and disinformation continue to rage."Catherine Powell, Eunice Carter Distinguished Research Scholar Professor of Law, Fordham Law School"In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, out of “all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” Those words were prescient and surfaced powerfully during the triple pandemics of COVID-19, systemic racism, and sexism – with both the “color and gender of COVID-19” on vivid display. This essential volume allows us to understand the intersectional way that gendered and raced effects operate using the “pandemic as a portal” to expose how COVID-19 exacerbates preexisting disparities and amplifies their disparate impact. This insightful book helps us to consider more fully how to rectify health inequities."Matiangai Sirleaf, Nathan Patz Professor of Law, University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law“This volume exemplifies how sex and gender influence health through an important, unique set of multidisciplinary, multi-country analyses. While the effects of COVID-19 are acute in our memory—and continue to surface in everyday life—this volume provides us with analytical approaches that should inform policy and research for years to come. As the pieces from India illustrate, public health understanding or action is incomplete without incisive analyses of the legal, economic and social forces that shape it.”Sapna Desai, Senior Fellow, Population Council Institute, India; Member, India Task Force of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19"The Routledge Companion to Gender and Covid is a timely volume which helps readers to reflect on government responses and recovery initiatives. It discusses the possibilities and challenges of policies and responses that serve as a resource for dealing with future pandemics. It is a must-read for policymakers and researchers who are working on gender, health and reproductive health, law and diseases."Melody Kshetrimayum, FLAME University, Pune, India

• PART I. TRAINING A GENDER LENS ON THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC 1. Introduction to Researching Gender and COVID-19 2. Law as a Determinant of Health: COVID-19 & Gender 3. Health Justice: Feminism, Universalism, and Vulnerability in Pandemic Response 4. We Are Not in This Together: Toward a Feminist Public Finance PART II. FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES 5. Gender, COVID, and Care 6. Pandemics, Privatization, and Public Education 7. Pandemic Impact and Women’s Resilience in China 8. Mind the Gap: The Promise and Perils of Technology and Courts During COVID-19 Naomi M. Mann 9. Lessons from Pandemic Co-Parenting: Toward Family Mediation that Centers Low-Income, Never-Married Black Mothers 10. Queer Inequality: The COVID-19 Spotlight PART III. ECONOMY, LABOR, AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION 11. Care and Economic Crisis 12. COVID-19 and Vulnerable Groups: Experiences of Sexual Minorities in Barbados 13. Does the EU COVID-19 Recovery Plan Care About Care? 14. The Resilience of Gender Equality: How COVID-19 Was Gendered in Norway 15. Manufacturing Crisis, Exacerbating Vulnerabilities: A Feminist Perspective on Crisis, Calamity, and the Political Economy of Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic 16. COVID-19 She-Cession: The Employment Penalty of Childcare 17. After the “Shecession”: Post-Pandemic Law and Policy for Working Mothers 18. Gender Inequality and the Increase of Unpaid Care Work in Mexico During the COVID-19 Pandemic PART IV. HEALTH 19. HIV Activism’s Lessons for Fighting COVID 20. Masculinity, Partisanship, and Responses to COVID-19 in the U.S. 21. Gendered Effects of U.S. Pandemic Border Policy on Migrants From Central America 22. Gender and Human Rights in the Context of COVID-19 23. Lockdowns, Gender, and Health PART V. REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH 24. The Resilience of Reproductive Rights 25. Reproductive Justice for Disabled People During COVID-19 and Beyond 26. The Shift of Medication Abortion Care Delivery Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on the Future of Sexual and Reproductive Health in the United States 27. Abortion Access in a Post-COVID and Post-Roe World 28. Religious Exemptions and Gender Equality in a Pandemic 29. Impact of COVID-19 on the Reproductive Rights of Marginalized Women in India 30. Access to Abortion During Covid-19 in India: Gaps and Challenges PART VI. POLITICS AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 31. Sharing is Caring: Women of Color California State Legislators Take to Facebook During COVID-19 Lockdowns as a Form of Constituent Services 32. Women’s Leadership is Associated with Few COVID-19 Deaths and Better Communication 33. Leadership in the Lands Down Under? A Comparative Print Media Analysis of the Morrison and Ardern Government COVID-19 Responses 34. The Gendered Effects of Covid in Colombia: Looking Beyond the Numbers 35. COVID-19, International Trade Law and the Gendered Dimensions of the Global Vaccine Apartheid: A Rights-Based Analysis