During the UK Gender and Development Network’s Women’s Economic Justice working group meeting on the theme of 'Covid-19: What does feminist economic recovery look like, and what are we going to do about it?', Rosa Pavanelli, PSI General Secretary set the tone for what could be the main track to follow in building a new inclusive economic order for women and all.

First, Pavanelli outlined three simple truths that COVID-19 pandemic has shown:

• the urgent need of quality public health services for all;

• the failure of the global market, of the international division of labour and of the global supply chains that when in need respond to national interests; and

• the evidence that the sexual division of work that exposed women more severely to the pandemic at the workplace as the majority of healthcare workers and caregivers at home.

It is time for us to say, “care is a human need” “care is a human right” and women must be the first beneficiaries of this new approach to care.

While facing the pandemic as first responders, women health workers are carrying the dual burden of paid and unpaid work; earning on average 30% less than their male counterparts; suffering gender-based violence at home and work; stigmatised as spreaders of the virus in their communities and families; and paying the highest toll for the many years of privatisation of public health services imposed by austerity measures.

Women’s labour is at the center of this contradiction that has not been fixed for centuries, today it is exacerbated by the health and economic crisis and remains a major injustice of this economic system. It is time for us to be bolder and human rights based and consider care as a human right. We need to revalue the role of care in societies, revalue care work and care public services, and think beyond the limited concept of the care economy. It is time for us to say, “care is a human need” “care is a human right” and women must be the first beneficiaries of this new approach to care.

We need to propose and push for what the global economy cannot deliver. For public services in public hands, for a future with gender equality where policy is built around the capacity to care, rather than the capacity to profit.

One way of financing this strategic objective is taxation. It is time to demand two necessary measures: a) extra taxes for the IT companies that have made lots of profit during this period and b) minimum 25% taxation must be introduced to corporations.

Everything must change if we really want to learn from this pandemic

A new economic order is needed, human rights based and centered in achieving gender and racial equality as one of the biggest intersectional discrimination problems of the current moment, with a profound environmental respect. We need to break the current limitations on individual and collective freedoms that governments adopted because of the pandemic, and above all stop the abuse of those measures imposed by authoritarian regimes and raise momentum to strengthen our capacity to join and fight for gender equality with an intersectional approach.

Finally, Pavanelli underlined the need to unite forces as women, as workers, as democratic people for this fight.