nonfiction books and authors every weekend. coming this weekend, sunday , at 9 pm eastern on afterwards wired magazine editor at large stephen levy discusses his facebook the inside story area and he's interviewed by the author in the financial times global business columnist. at 10 pm eastern former speaker of the house newt gingrich offers his thoughts on why president trump should be reflected with his book trump and the american future. solving the great problems of our time. whatbook tv on c-span2 this weekend . >> a discussion now on the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic on women and what can be done about. us ambassador at large for global women's issues kelly curry outlined the trump administration plan area. >> at you all for joining us

this afternoon. i'm jean elwood, vice president of foundation and institutional getting at the atlantic council. i'm so pleased to welcome you to the first of a series of events the atlantic council and our global business and economic programs will be hosting around covid-19 economic impact on women area covid-19 is a crisis like no other and it has had a catastrophic effect on women's economic well-being area of course as we all know, women were already at an economic disadvantage before this crisis. in every corner of the world women have been at a disadvantage in terms of education , career options, wage rates, financial inclusion and access to technology area the burden of unpaid work and family care also contribute to widening genderinequality. at the same time , women have been at the front line of fighting covid-19. essential workers to childcare. and now is of the impact on the service and retail industries, women are bearing

the bruntof economic cost . we the atlantic council are committed to understanding what is happening both here at the within the united states and around the world and striving to chart a better way forwardout of the crisis . i'm excited about our global business and economic program working to develop an inclusive growth initiative as a key part of their work. because you can only piece strong abroad if you are strong at home. we have a group of experts joining us today who will unpack these challenges and offer promising policies and practices. guiding this important conversation is the leading ally in true champion or gender equality in all facets . ross kumar. he also just happens to be the founding president and editor-in-chief of a social enterprise and media platform for the global development community with over 100 team members around the world. his recent book the business

of changing the world was published last year in name the world economic forum's book-of-the-month and reviewed and reported on bloomberg businessweek, pds and pr and boss. not to mention ross is in demand as a speaker for a variety of corporate and philanthropic audiences. ross is a thought leader and avid number of global dialogue . one thing that intrigues me about roche is his commitment . since his childhood in fact, for making the world a better place area is bio states that he and his team members get up every day committed to ensuring mobile that altman efforts do more good to promote people. roche, thank you for your leadership and commitment to gender equality. suffice to say we are all in truly capable hands and thrilled he could join us today. roche, take it away. >> at a very kind introduction and hopefully

resume does not show me blushing as i am on theinside . hello everyone. wherever your joining us from all over the world, this is an important topic and i'm so glad the atlantic council is working on and i'm honored to be part of this event today. of course the crisis it's hard to believe it'sstill a crisis going on for so long . we wake up many of us still in our homes and it's a reminder of how long-standing this is and how deep the impacts are and we all know this inequality has existed before covid are just being amplified. they are being exposed in deeper ways now so conversations like this are so important that we get together with real experts on and we hear from them directly and that's what this session is about area we got a fantastic group of experts, without ambassador kelly curry was here with the ambassador at large for global women's issues at the state department. a long career in the foreign-policy space working

on human rights and working on issues of gender equality so really hear her take on all of us today. henry cole who those of you know well and often appears in our pages and our events, she's had ofgender . again, very eager to hear her multilateral perspective and nicole goldman who is a fellow at the atlantic council and is widely known as a realexpert on these issues . so here to get that use into this discussion too. welcome to the three of you. thank you for doing this as well and a big thank you to all of you joining us around the world, feel free to throw in questions . there's a check, you can put questions right here into the chat window . there's also twitter, throw your questions on twitter and the folks at the atlantic council are sharing them, we will try to use them into the discussion and give you time for your what is a big topic that i think gina laid out very wellat the outset , to begin i can turn to you ambassador curry just to say

give us the big picture perspective here. where months into this crisis in many parts of the world is getting worse including here. there's a lot of challenge in our own country but a lot of countries have lower resources. what is a broad picture when it comes to the economic impact on women due to this and ? >> your not here yet so you might need to unmute . >> there we go. is that better?first i want to thank everyone for who's made this event today possible. thank you for letting me be with you, it's a pleasure to be with such an accomplished group to have roche and moderating this great discussion and just participating with my friend nicole and colleague henriette about this issue very much taken over our whole lives in so many ways from support to personalize. when i came into office i

started this job in january and i had only been on the job are about 2 and a half months when we started realizing things, that this was an issue we needed to start dealing with but at the beginning it was far away and not really think that we were having to grapple with it certainly was obviously. and as we look at what we were doing and in our office in particular which is responsible obviously for the us foreign policy and importations of women's issues and how we incorporate concern about women's empowerment into ourforeign and national security policy , it's been really amazing to have the kinds of tools that i had coming into my office that allowed us to be flexible and nimble and respond to this challenge. and specifically i have been when i was nominated for this position, it was very clear based on the work that had been done previous to my

confirmation that the white house really was very much focused on the women's. agenda as well as the women's economic empowerment agenda area and we've been taking bold action to unleash greater opportunities for women to fully and freely participate in the economy here in the united states as well as overseas and it's been a hallmark of the administration. so we've been doing that by standing efforts in the federal government in the private sector andworking with our partners overseas in particular . so we feel like our policies in the united states have obviously set us up where women were enabled in the economy. and able to participate in record numbers prior to the pandemic. and where we were at a point where women comprise 47 percent of the workforce in the united states and were getting over 70 percent of all new jobs that were created in 2019 so we were coming into this crisis at a very high point from our own

policy posture. and we had a 66 year low in female unemployment all these great indicators. >> .. for employers to be able to provide the adequate protections and relief at all levels of society is important. women are often the primary caregivers, as we all know. here in the united states we focus on how we are going to minimize the delay between what skills workers currently have in order to see in the economy and

what skills they will need to see it in the future. we have to shorten that timeline up and focus on getting new skills out for women and girls, both skilled building those efforts. this is something we did for the crisis and even more crucial that we do it today. we have been pivoted towards responding to the global crisis and local economic collapse and in particular we really have found a woman's global development and prosperity initiative to be a wonderful tool and i was always fortunate -- i can't take credit for anything about how it was set up because it predated my arrival but it has been a questionable platform for us to attack this problem and at the beginning a little concerned because i felt that women were being characterized on this as victims who were passive actors sitting and waiting for someone

to come and save them and that certainly is not how we feel about trying to empower women in the workforce or through our women security efforts. we are very much focused on women's as agent and chains and drivers of change in our immediate thought in march was how do we push out this message that women are going to beat the drivers of the recovery and women are critical to this response and they are active agents and doing all that they need from their front lines to the home across the spectrum and when we start to move into the recovery phase you got to get women in your economy you got to get them off the sidelines or you will not recover effectively. that has been a major focus of our foreign policy efforts as we have moved out with implement w gdp in this crisis and age. i will stop there because i feel like -- >> but you through a lot of

interesting things at the table that i want to come back to. you talked about how women do play a unique role in the pandemic asked affects everyone but as you said, yes, but not equally and women do represent frontline healthcare workers at a higher percentage in much of the world and the beauty of care and domestic care, caregiving, unpaid work basically has substantially increased and you talk about the jobs picture and it is true that when we were at the historical high, a lot of those jobs were industry hit hard so let's unpack all of that and come back around. you are at the ic so you're looking at the private sector lends and public policy so what is your take on that same question and how you see the economic impacts for women of evolving in this pandemic? >> thank you. thank you for getting us together, not just to talk about the challenges but the solutions

we can use. to give you a bit of context we are currently looking at potential up to 100 million being pushed into poverty and it's a huge reversal from where we have come to and just to remind everyone [inaudible] we also see 1.1 million students going into daycare. that leads to around 0.6 months and lost schooling and potentially even longer. last but not least, from the private sector standpoint around 500 billion have already left the emerging-market so that is the quick picture. what does that mean for particularly with women in the international finance corporation is investing in companies and what we have found is quite staggering that echoes the headlines that you just mentioned. one of the -- one is around

employment. if i dial it back before the crisis the emerging markets were already losing up to 48 trillion in terms of lifetime earnings between men and women so that was gigantic but now you have a large trough of women in the workforce and their counterparts so you can see how that is expanding and how it's lost on the microlevel -- >> just to underline that give so much data at your disposal of the world bank but we are seeing that women are losing their jobs in higher numbers and seen they are not entering back in the workforce and i just want to make sure that is something we are seeing in the data already. >> we see that in the data both in developing and developing markets. [inaudible] what we are seeing is the reason for dropouts are buried. one is because women are concentrated often times in

those that are most impacted and women are also often times an informal, income jobs in the service industry and they are being diminished. this has exacerbated some of the challenges. as almost a paralytic pandemic is and i think hopefully program it will be a huge wake-up call around the world to say enough is enough and care needs to be tackled as an infrastructure and cannot be pushed over to large parts of women which will be forced to choose between paid and unpaid work and again we have seen data points that come from our clients and women are leaving in larger droves because they can juggle the two anymore. [inaudible] some of the data coming out of phoenix, the woman entrepreneurship finance

stimulates the research and one is looking at how women entrepreneurs in the emerging markets are impacted in their counterparts. in uganda what we've seen is 61% of women of enterprise have loss of income compared to 22% of men and counterparts. if you look at the global level facebook has done research around the impacted crisis has had on women of entrepreneurs and male entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs are up to [inaudible] if you look at u.s. research all the women and minorities are much more proportionally impacted. >> but is that due to lack of access for capital? is at the main reason why you see women having to close their businesses? they don't have other sources to support them through this time? >> it is just not capital but capital is one reason so working capital, particularly its a

binding constraint for women entrepreneurs but we've also seen oftentimes women are already not as productive in their entrepreneurial compared to men. it's often concentrated in the hardest hit so we have seen a multitude of reasons as to why women ultra doers are harder hit but the other part is that again they care components limit how much women can actually focus on their productive activities compared to their unpaid or unproductive activities at the household level. last but not least, one thing we all look to is the cure as a means of engagement around payment, financial platforms, labor platforms, commerce, e-commerce platforms but women are 17% less likely to [inaudible] so we need to work with our client responding and breaking that digital divide the combines the challenge that last but not least, i would like to point out one more thing that oftentimes talked about and

holds for every sector is that decision-making is most geared to mail decision-making. [inaudible] for it to be effective we need to hear from children and women and minorities in order to design a crisis response that meets the challenges and demands for the most underserved communities and i agree when they say we don't want to claim victim on minorities or other groups as victims but we want to make sure that we are seeing them as economic change agents and not in the next round of questions i could share some of the incredible extraordinary solutions that women doors have come up with themselves and tackling some of the demands. >> that would be great. to that point about male leadership, if you look at the global health spaces as an example it is still the leadership roles are largely dominated by men and yet most of

the actual people providing services in global health are women. >> 70% are women. >> yet, if you don't have the perspective one of the challenges for community health care worker who is trying to both care for her own family and get added care for the community she is responsible for. ultimately health assistants are only strong as our front-line workers and i hear many in the community is not sufficiently supporting. >> if i may, we mentioned the point on healthcare systems and one thing we've seen is that violence has increased up to 20% and what is so important is that we build in our response a systematic approach as opposed to a one-off short-term hotlines are important but how can the health sector as a whole address violence or the education sector but you need to get much more systematic in our response to gender-based violence which i do want to round out on because this is something that women in particular are being productive

and fully present and work and being able to deal with things and the increased stress and lack of mobility. >> great point. i'm glad you put that out there but maybe we can come back to health care system which could fit in that solution bucket, if we can think big about possibly using this crisis as an argument for a major investment in global public health care systems. let me get to you, nicole. you can comment on all of this and there are so many interesting issues that the ambassador puts on the table. you planned this so well. let me turn it over to you and i love to get your thoughts spirit great, thanks so much. thanks to everyone for joining us today. it's a really important conversation that i am thrilled to be a part of myself and to be with all of you. you are right. there is a lot of directions and comments that been made that i can touch on but let me pick up on that. in addition to the gender

inequality that we see in the impact of covid there is this interracial intergenerational as well and one of the opening comments that gina made that you commented on as well is the situation before the pandemic headed for young women and young people around the world here in the u.s. and abroad was that race. right? you son of women has been a lingering challenge all around the world and in various exten extents, since 2008 and even before that what we saw with the way the global financial collapse in 2008 is proportionally affected young people then is we are seeing that now. with covid, in particular, there is almost a triple shock if you will to young women. before the pandemic hit roughly one third of young women around the world were not in education,

employment or training and nearly 40% of those were in upwards of 40% and lower to middle income countries. just a quick close, i had a paper that came out last week with the atlantic middle east program that looked at the opportunities for a demographic dividend in italy south africa among and one of the particular issues that we talked about is the very low economic participation of young women, only 16% of young arab women were active. this is before the pandemic hits. what's surfacing or exacerbating is a lot of challenges that were already there. as far as why young women are being disproportionally hit within women themselves as a larger group? some of the things that have been spoken to are again, but cute for young women. if you look at the kinds of work

where young women are working they are often engaged in the informal sector as well and/or they are in the sectors that tend to be either part-time or not necessarily in secure work but contractor seasonal or cyclical in the lower scale or entry-level that they are more likely to be last one on, first one off. so to speak. in fact in a recent survey done by the ilo of youth that remained employed after the covid hit have seen their hours cut by about 25% on average. again, even where they are continuing to work they are seeing an average cut and seen these shifts. again, similar thing with the industry. healthcare, hospitality, service sector so these are areas where there is a drop in consumer spending as a result of economic shutdown and young people not

only lose their jobs but where they do have small businesses and where they are young entrepreneurs they are likely facing trouble and already adding on to what is a capital access constraint and so on and so forth. i think the other piece that is really important to talk about when we talk about the disproportionate impact on young women in particular is the impact on education and training. and how that is having longer-term effects and will affect their potential as well as where they are now good as we no, and people are very dynamic and many are both in school and working at the same time trying to scale up for a better job or different job that may not be available. as a result of this crisis not only is there a health crisis and an economic crisis but related to the education crisis, nearly over 90% of schools, if not more, schools and training centers have been closed across 192 countries did in that same

survey of young people and another survey at least 90% are almost 95, 98% recorded that they saw their education or training disrupted by the covid crisis. when you think about young women and even getting into the impact on girls on the road a generational impact this is a really critical point we need to keep in mind in the way this is affecting in the really broad reach in terms of this crisis. >> when you think about the future and how these inequalities have been with us a long time is the young generation -- this is the chance. young women getting into universities and trained and into the workforce, starting businesses, that is a big opportunity and if we lose this moment we lose two years of that the effects will be long-term. >> absolutely. we are still a scene even effects of how this began from 2008 and the impact of that and how it delayed entry into the

workforce and we know young people already had a longer time getting into the workforce and getting that first job for many of them and this will only make that worse. there is some interesting and still data coming in on studies, and showing how if you look at the impact of school closures from the evil crisis where sierra leone schools were closed for upward of nine months, that was five, six years ago and many of those young women and young people are still feeling those in backspace they haven't necessarily unable to catch up. i think that is really important and something we need to keep in mind and is critical. one of the other pieces i wanted to touch on that henrietta mentioned in terms of the digital infrastructure and digital access because again that is really critical as we are seeing, not only the move toward remote work and young women and the importance of potentially remote work for

young women but also for remote learning. as schools are closing there has been an enhancement and move toward online learning but we also know young women don't necessarily have the access to the information and the icp access and internet infrastructure, if you will, and they don't necessarily have the digital scales. it's a compounding issue that again is limiting these opportunity in the immediate to shift towards a more, digital landscape in terms of learning and work but also affecting what might be, not only the new normal for now, but the perspective opportunities in the future. it's creating and compounding, you know, effect on this intergenerational impact on top of what we know is the gender burden. that is something to keep in mind.

a point we also made about the data and, i think, one of the challenges we have is where we often are collecting data that is more success aggregated and were not necessarily doing that enough. we don't necessarily have enough gender data but on top of that again is that age disaggregation. we also don't know what we don't know. it can be hard to identify where those gaps are if we don't have that data that really will help us tell that story and understand where those gaps are so we can work to fill them. >> would anyone want to take a deep dive into this it is a issue we have a site up on this google gender data. if you want to be nerdy there is a lot there. it's an important topic. ambassador curry, there is so much on the table you could comment on but in addition, could you bring us by the

curtain. he been in role since december 2019 and probably most every time there has been dominated by this pandemic now so far and likely the rest of your time will be dominated by this pandemic. what are the conversations like with your counterparts in other foreign governments? is there a theme here or any economic impact on women or is it just us in this conversation, is this getting the priority that you think it deserves? >> it is absolutely on the minds of my counterparts and on the minds of other countries that we work with. developed countries we are trying to partner with through the g7, through the g20, two other economic multilateral engagements that we are having good we are very much focused on this. as well as our developing partners. one of the great things about again and i feel like i'm very lucky because i did come in with this incredible set, with the w

gdp initiative which was focused on three key areas that are of absolute, critical, importance as we try to come back from this economic crisis. workforce training skill development which women will need to respond to the changes in the economy and addressing their lack of access to capital and making women's entre nous worship more durable, more sustainable and more capable of really earning the living wage that they need to be able to preserve their families and address the overall enabling environment which there continue to be laws, regulations and policies and cultural norms in place that keep women on the sidelines, keep them out of the economy and keep them from fully participating. the plan this year was to really focus on that enabling environments and looking at the legal barriers that we would see

focused on countries to get to remove those legal barriers to women in meaningful participation across the economy. so what we had done before covid was the white house council of economic advisors crated this index to determine what would be the benefit if every country still had restrictions in fundamental areas of law if they were to remove those restrictions and they found that this would generate $7 trillion in the digital gdp just in these five areas. the reason these five areas were chosen we think this is important now because as much as would be nice to put a whole lot of additional resources into the system countries will be struggling. we will see the amount in the loan packages coming from the world bank group and the level of assistance in the loan forgiveness efforts going on and

almost every country around the world but especially developing countries have seen the bottom fall out of their fiscal situation. asking them to then make big huge commitments in a situation when they can't pay their payroll of government workers is not feasible or practical. we are focused on five areas that require no expenditure of public funds but really do require clinical will and it is things like making sure women have equal access to inherit and own property. we saw in a bowl is also very important that where there were these disparities women whose husband who spouses died lost everything, they lost the home where they are and their children lived in their subsistence farms and the relatives and their property away and had nothing. making sure the countries are adjusting things like that. access to institutions and again been able to get ids and things

like that you really need to be able to have a business function at the court. building credit and been able to access credit equally and being able to work in any sector of the economy that you choose because as we talk about women being pushed into these pink caller ghettos as we call them here in the united states the developing world is often very low margin, very difficult and the first industry to be affected so given them the opportunity to compete in industries that have higher wages, more economic security is important and ability to travel freely around the country. if countries on the world have restrictions in those five very fun mental areas were to remove them we could, we had done the research know we would be far better off. post covid crisis is more

important than ever that countries do anything they can to remove these barriers and not put any speed bumps or any barriers in the way of trying to come back from this. we are in currently focused on how we help our partners with these very practical and i they seem like small things but because of the amount of political wills that is required we are dedicating to diplomatic programmatic interventions and dedicating intervention with our diplomacy around the stew and we are deeply focused on trying to help partners they want to make these changes and take these steps but don't necessarily have the wherewithal on their own. we are trying to help them get there. >> think evaporate i do want to come back later to the conversation and is there something bigger that we can do that most of these countries don't have the face -- space but

other countries and what are we doing to consider the depth of this crisis to support the whole world, not just our own economy. let's come back right we've got questions starting to come in and i want to mind everyone that we have the q&a window and we put it in on twitter and we did have a question command that i want to rip on a little bit who is asking about female dominated through gender fields and she's talking about essential industries like teachers and nurses and if you think about this pandemic which is growing here in the united states, very fast, almost out of control it is growing in india and going in brazil and in many countries in the philippines and other places and who is on the front line taking the risk, the personal physical risk is women and we don't yet know about schools and it is a female dominated industry and a lot of women will be at physical risk and want how

you feel about that. there is an economic component to it but to have any take on this and what will it mean for the labor force going forward? >> i'm happy to jump in. the risks are differing between men and women and what can the private sector do to address those things, you might look that up and [inaudible] is online but what can insurance companies due to really build resilience that takes into account where women as policyholders come in because it was quite surprising that a lot of insurers were looking at and assume that men women had the same risks and health and life and so on and what we have seen is they are not the same risk. helping insurance companies out of the risk but also to work

with the companies to create different products, services and distribution channels paid for example, you need to make sure you bridge the gap in order to do that successfully and bring women along but also if you look at your marketing and communications don't assume the male household earner is the one with the assets. assume women have increased their exposure to tertiary [inaudible] have increased the participation originally in the labor force over the past decades and have respect that women are getting married late later -- >> we take you lied to the white house for today's briefing with press secretary kayleigh mcena mcenany. stomach hello everyone. this afternoon president trump will deliver remarks on rolling back regulations to help all americans. the regulation has been a top priority of this president. the president