Endemicity, Care, and Gender: Developing a Roadmap for the Resilience of the Malaysian Care Sector (RE: CARE)
Team:
Principal Investigator: Ms. Anis Farid (Women’s Aid Organization) Canadian
Co-Principal Investigator: Dr. Denise L. Spitzer (University of Alberta)
Decision-Maker Co-Principal Investigators: Ms. Mahuran Saro Sariki (Talent Corp), Dr. Noor Raihan Khamal, Ministry of Health, Government of Malaysia
Co-Investigators: Ms. Shazana Agha (Women’s Aid Organization), Dr. Shanthi Thambiah(University of Malaya), Mr. Yu Ren Chung (Women’s Aid Organization)
Research Assistant—University of Alberta: Ms. Melissa Tirkha
Summary of Project:
Care work has long been disproportionately shouldered by women, both professionally and privately. The situation was exacerbated by COVID-19 and remains a problem, despite the move towards endemicity. This project based in Malaysia focuses on the burden of care work, formal and informal, paid and unpaid, considering social identifiers, such as ethnicity, gender, and class across a spectrum of women essential care workers, such as doctors, cleaners, nurses, social workers, and domestic workers, residing in varying household and familial configurations across the pandemic and in transitions into endemicity. Utilizing mixed methods—in-depth interviews, quantitative surveys, focus group discussions, and policy assessments—and deploying an intersectional lens and feminist participatory research principles, the RE:Care project informs gender-transformative care policies and infrastructure in Malaysia moving forward.
