Reuters :
Efforts to help the world economy recover from the coronavirus crisis must give a lead role to women, even as the pandemic deals an especially sharp blow to their jobs and finances, philanthropist Melinda Gates said.
Recovery policies and strategies that focus on women – and do not minimize or overlook them – will prove the most successful, the co-chair of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said in an interview this week. “They are going to be the engines of recovery, and we will build back faster and better,” Gates told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Otherwise it’s going to be a very, very long and slow recovery in country after country around the world.”
Gates spoke following the publication this week of an opinion piece she wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, in which she outlined policy proposals focused on women. She said it was vital for policymakers to ensure emergency cash aid schemes reach women who do not have a tax number or formal identity documents.
Stimulus programs must be designed to include the smallest businesses, which are often run by women, she wrote. “You’ve got to get the money in the hands of the women… because of the sensible decisions they make,” said Gates, who co-chairs the foundation with her husband, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
In the United States, women have lost more jobs than men in the pandemic, accounting for more than half the jobs lost since February, according to a labor data analysis by the National Women’s Law Center, a U.S. women’s rights non-profit.
