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This Special Issue is entitled “Women, patriarchy, and health inequalities: an unresolved issue”. This unresolved issue—highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and illustrated via this collection of articles—is the urgent need to reorient our systems away from reproducing and privileging the dominance of men through inequality, as our current systems do, and advance towards systems that privilege health and wellbeing, human rights for all and our fragile natural environment. Globally, the pandemic has laid underlying systems of inequality within societies and between countries bare. The rich have become richer, whilst the poor and marginalised have suffered the worst health and social impacts. This is true for women globally, who are being disproportionately affected through the health, social and economic consequences of the pandemic. Most front line and essential workers are women, and it is women who have been losing their sources of income in the greatest numbers. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), for example, even with the success in containing the virus, 11,000 people lost their jobs during the March 2020 comprehensive lockdown, of whom 10,000 were women [1]. Meanwhile, in low-income countries and communities, where the virus has not been contained, women continue to have greater challenges accessing quality healthcare. These outcomes are borne from pre-existing gender inequities globally, where women bear both the greatest burden of disease and make up the largest proportion of unpaid and undervalued workers. Even where progress has been made when it comes to equality, and where the life expectancy of women …