“I was facilitating everybody else’s life. And mine had just ground to a halt”: the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on women in the UK

A growing body of research has highlighted the disproportionately negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women globally. This paper contributes to this work by interrogating the lived realities of 64 women in the UK through semi-structured interviews, undertaken during the first and second periods of lockdown associated with COVID-19 in 2020. Categorising the data by theme and type of gendered disadvantage, this paper explores the normative and policy-imposed constraints experienced by women in 2020, highlighting the role that government can and should proactively play in attending to gender inequalities throughout its COVID-19 response.