Join The Department of Political Studies Corry Colloquium Committee & Canadian Opinion Research Archive as they host Patricia Mocker, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Canadian Opinion Research Archive at Queen’s University and Western University. 

This project explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for women’s political participation in Canada. Drawing on data from the Canadian Election Study’s Democracy Checkup surveys, we examine how women’s participation evolved with the introduction of public health measures to manage the spread of the virus. The disruptions caused by the COVID -19 pandemic changed the availability of important resources that are precursors to political participation; time, money, and access to opportunities for political socialization became scarcer. These disruptions were not distributed equally across sociodemographic groups but instead have been structured by the politics of gender and have been most pronounced for those citizens who were less likely to participate in politics before the pandemic (Johnston et al. 2020, Baiden et al. 2022, Davison et al. 2020, Tolley 2019). This presentation probes the impacts of these changes for gender gaps in political participation and specifically considers the experiences of racialized women and mothers.