Barsoum Ghada, Majbouri Mahdi
The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt.
Babson College, Wellesley, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 10;15(1):1574. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-84452-7.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of great intensity that exposed many existing inequities in facing this global threat. Building on Galtung's conceptualization of positive peace as the absence of structural violence and institutionalized inequality, we study the gendered effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on reported subjective wellbeing (SWB) in four countries in the Middle East. Data from mobile phone panel surveys, with a total sample of 12,614 observations collected during this critical juncture, show that women consistently reported a lower level of SWB than men in all four countries. Women experienced higher increases in unemployment rates than men in all four countries, despite their already higher rates prior to the pandemic. Controlling for individual characteristics and geographic-time fixed effects, the main factor associated with lower SWB was the decline in household income, reflecting the intersectionality of poverty and gender. In addition, the reported increase in the time spent on housework negatively affected women's SWB, particularly in urban areas. The pandemic has further accentuated gender inequality in all four countries and exposed the inherent structural violence experienced by women in these contexts.
新冠疫情期间形势严峻，暴露出应对这一全球威胁时许多现存的不平等现象。基于加尔通将积极和平概念化为不存在结构性暴力和制度化不平等的观点，我们研究了中东四个国家新冠疫情对报告的主观幸福感（SWB）的性别影响。在这一关键时刻收集的手机面板调查数据，总样本量为12614份观测结果，显示在所有四个国家中，女性报告的主观幸福感水平始终低于男性。在所有四个国家中，女性的失业率增幅高于男性，尽管在疫情之前她们的失业率就已经较高。在控制了个人特征和地理时间固定效应后，与主观幸福感较低相关的主要因素是家庭收入下降，这反映了贫困与性别的交叉性。此外，报告显示家务劳动时间增加对女性的主观幸福感产生了负面影响，尤其是在城市地区。疫情进一步加剧了所有四个国家的性别不平等，并暴露了这些背景下女性所经历的内在结构性暴力。
