A shared agenda for gender and COVID-19 research: priorities based on broadening engagement in science.

While the acute and collective crisis from the pandemic is over, an estimated 2.5 million people died from COVID-19 in 2022, tens of millions suffer from long COVID and national economies still reel from multiple deprivations exacerbated by the pandemic. Sex and gender biases deeply mark these evolving experiences of COVID-19, impacting the quality of science and effectiveness of the responses deployed. To galvanise change by strengthening evidence-informed inclusion of sex and gender in COVID-19 practice, we led a virtual collaboration to articulate and prioritise gender and COVID-19 research needs. In addition to standard prioritisation surveys, feminist principles mindful of intersectional power dynamics underpinned how we reviewed research gaps, framed research questions and discussed emergent findings. The collaborative research agenda-setting exercise engaged over 900 participants primarily from low/middle-income countries in varied activities. The top 21 research questions included the importance of the needs of pregnant and lactating women and information systems that enable sex-disaggregated analysis. Gender and intersectional aspects to improving vaccine uptake, access to health services, measures against gender-based violence and integrating gender in health systems were also prioritised. These priorities are shaped by more inclusive ways of working, which are critical for global health as it faces further uncertainties in the aftermath of COVID-19. It remains imperative to address the basics in gender and health (sex-disaggregated data and sex-specific needs) and also advance transformational goals to advance gender justice across health and social policies, including those related to global research.

'It feels like my visibility matters': Women ageing with HIV overcoming the 'violence of invisibility' through community, advocacy and the radical act of care for others.

OBJECTIVES: A participatory qualitative study exploring women's experiences of ageing with HIV in London, United Kingdom. The research considered how the concept of 'community' was relevant to women's experiences and what constructions of 'community' could be discerned in the experiences, accounts given and discourses employed by older women living with HIV. METHODS: The research presented in this article was conducted as a PhD study between 2015 and 2019. The study was structured in multiple and overlapping phases, and adopted a feminist and participatory approach. The methods used in the research were as follows: participatory literature review, participatory creative workshops, policy review and stakeholder interviews, life story interviews, and a participatory analysis workshop. RESULTS: Eighteen women living with HIV aged over 50 participated in creative workshops and fourteen women in life story interviews. Women's experiences of ageing with HIV are shaped by intersecting identities, community responses, and personal connections. Ageing with HIV brings challenges, added to and augmented by other difficulties women face in their lives, but women draw on individual and community assets in order to adapt, cope and thrive. Belonging to a community of women living with HIV and a broader community of people living with HIV created a vital space of safety, in which women found support, advice, and meaning. CONCLUSIONS: Women ageing with HIV countered the 'violence of invisibility' through forming community with other women living with HIV, rejecting stigma, and enacting a personal form of advocacy through care for others.

Searching for the Second R in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights.

Sexual and reproductive health and rights have gained prominence in the HIV response. The role of sexual and reproductive health in underpinning a successful approach to HIV prevention, treatment, care, and services has increasingly been recognized. However, the "second R," referring to sexual and reproductive rights, is often neglected. This leads to policies and programs which both fail to uphold and fulfill these rights and which fail to meet the needs of those most affected by HIV by neglecting to take account of the human right-based barriers and challenges they face. In this commentary, the authors draw on the approach and practical experiences of the Link Up program, and the findings of a global consultation led for and by young people living with and most affected by HIV, to present a five-point framework to improve programming and health outomces by better protecting, respecting, and fulfilling the sexual health and reproductive rights of young people living with and most vulnerable to HIV.

Linking Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and HIV Services for Young People: The Link Up Project.

Sexual health and access to services are a pressing need for young people. This article introduces Link Up, a 3-year project in three African and two Asian countries, to enable and scale up access to integrated HIV services and sexual and reproductive health and rights for marginalized young people. The young people we worked with in this project included young men who have sex with men, young sex workers, young people who use drugs, young transgender people, young homeless people, and other vulnerable young people. The research and programmatic activities of Link Up, as illustrated in this Supplement, have highlighted the importance of recognizing and engaging with diversity among young people to improve access to services and outcomes protecting their health and human rights.

In Women's Eyes: Key Barriers to Women's Access to HIV Treatment and a Rights-Based Approach to their Sustained Well-Being.

There is rightly a huge global effort to enable women living with HIV to have long productive lives, through treatment access. However, many women living with HIV experience violence against women (VAW), in both domestic and health care settings. The ways in which VAW might prevent treatment access and adherence for women has not to date been reviewed coherently at the global level, from women's own perspectives. Meanwhile, funding for global health care, including HIV treatment, is shrinking. To optimize women's health and know how best to optimize facilitators and minimize barriers to access and adherence, especially in this shrinking funding context, we need to understand more about these issues from women's own perspectives. In response, we conducted a three-phase review: (1) a literature review (phase one); (2) focus group discussions and interviews with nearly 200 women living with HIV from 17 countries (phase two); and (3) three country case studies (phase three). The results presented here are based predominantly on women's own experiences and are coherent across all three phases. Recommendations are proposed regarding laws, policies, and programs which are rights-based, gendered, and embrace diversity, to maximize women's voluntary, informed, confidential, and safe access to and adherence to medication, and optimize their long-term sexual and reproductive health.