Gender, Trade, and Development: Examining Old and New Issues in The Global Trading System

The COVID-19 pandemic has sharply increased the gender divide, pushing women in their economic and social spaces even further to the bottom, while overlapping and interacting with global trade policy, which has played a crucial role in the pandemic. In light of the pandemic and its impact on women, there is much that global trade policy can deliver; both on traditional, mandated issues in the World Trade Organisation such as agriculture, fisheries, NAMA, services, and intellectual property rights; as well as in new issues such as e-commerce, investment facilitation, government procurement, and others.

This event will laid out snapshots of the impacts of the pandemic and its interaction with trade policy on women’s lives in multiple sectors and multi-layered contexts, and identified key issues that global trade policy can address and how.