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Gender Differences in Perceived Risk and Knowledge about COVID 19: An Indian Perspective

Ruchi Jain, National Council of Applied Economic Research, India
Sumiran Chandra, NCAER
Santanu Pramanik, National Council of Applied Economic Research, India
Sonalde B. Desai, University of Maryland
Dinesh Tiwari, National Council of Applied Economic Research

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the outbreak of COVID-19 as a global public health emergency. There is exponential rise in the number of individuals and the number of deaths are also increasing and therefore it becomes increasingly important to understand how people perceive risk during an epidemic (Van Bavel et al. 2020). The increasing progression of coronavirus, multiple lockdowns and government’s awareness building efforts have impacted people’s risk perception of COVID 19. The risk perception varies by gender and which is very much evident from the present paper, which uses data collected from 3641 households during two rounds of cross-sectional telephonic surveys in Delhi and national capital region. The study tries to examine men’s and women’s risk perceptions for COVID-19 infection and it varies by their socioeconomic background. Using five-point Likert scale, the results suggest that females had significantly high risk perception of COVID 19 than males. Findings from ordinal logistic regression also indicates that gender was significantly associated with risk perception. Younger participants in the age group of 18-24 had higher risk perception compared with older counterparts. Findings also suggest that people staying in the containment zones perceived themselves at higher risk.

Keywords: COVID-19, Gender, Demographic and social surveys, Cross-country comparative analyses

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P21.