Introduction

Infectious disease outbreaks affect men, women, transgender, and nonbinary people in dif fer ent ways. 1 This can range from sex-based differences in health outcomes, whereby physiological or hormonal characteristics may mean that infection with a pathogen leads to poorer outcomes in one sex than another, or these differences may be gendered.Gendered differences tend to appear as secondary effects of the policies introduced by governments to mitigate the spread of an infectious disease outbreak.These include, among other things, the impacts of changes to social interaction, paid and unpaid care work, and access to healthcare services.As researchers who have previously researched the gendered effects of epidemics both individually and collectively, in January 2020, we anticipated a range of gendered effects related to COVID-19.We started to have conversations about the ways we thought people of dif fer ent genders would be adversely and differentially affected by the emerging disease, initially considering those in China, where the pandemic began.Even back then, without the knowledge base we have since developed, we predicted that women would be most of the healthcare workers on the front lines of the response.We knew that the mass school closures in China and Hong Kong in January and February 2020 would have a knock-on effect on women, who suddenly had to provide round-the-clock childcare and home schooling to their children, either alongside their paid employment or sacrificing paid employment to do so.Further cognizant of intersectional feminist thought, we knew not all women would be affected equally or in the same ways-race, class, geographies, socioeconomic status, and beyond, shaped further by neoliberal and colonial systems of oppression, would differentiate experiences.For example, we knew that the large foreign domestic worker labor force in Hong Kong