This paper describes four areas where feminist movements have led change through expertise, capacity, and influence to anchor and build a field of activist public health that responds to violence against women and girls (VAWG). It looks at how feminist actors have worked to ground the field of prevention in persistent engagement with ecological frameworks, feminist ethics, and power analysis in order to shape and assess intervention models, research questions, and funding principles in ways that centre accountability to women and girls; to inspire a commitment to centering experimentation and innovation; and to press for the recognition of practitioners as knowledge producers and as experts in programme design (including an active commitment to decolonisation by shifting resources and visibility to Global South research institutions and knowledge producers).

This article asks the questions:How do we reach the goal of gender-mainstreamed health systems across countries of the world? How can health systems be gender responsive and gender resilient? With whom should we engage, and how, so that the catastrophic effects of disease outbreaks are offset for individuals and collectives whose disadvantages are compounded by intersecting identities and characteristics, including gender?These and other questions were crowdsourced across 5 thematic areas for the research prioritisation process on gender and COVID-19 co-convened by the United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health, and the University of the Western Cape’s School of Public Health.