This afternoon. Im jean elwood, Vice President of foundation and institutional getting at the Atlantic Council. Im 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 covid19 Economic Impact on women area covid19 is a crisis like no other and it has had a catastrophic effect on womens economic wellbeing 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 covid19. 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. Im 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 editorinchief 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 forums bookofthemonth 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 im so glad the Atlantic Council is working on and im honored to be part of this event today. Of course the crisis its hard to believe itsstill a crisis going on for so long. We wake up many of us still in our homes and its a reminder of how longstanding 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 thats 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 womens issues at the state department. A long career in the foreignpolicy 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, shes 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. Theres a check, you can put questions right here into the chat window. Theres 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. Theres 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 whos made this event today possible. Thank you for letting me be with you, its 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 womens issues and how we incorporate concern about womens empowerment into ourforeign and National Security policy , its 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 womens. Agenda as well as the womens Economic Empowerment agenda area and weve 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 its been a hallmark of the administration. So weve 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 womans Global Development and Prosperity Initiative to be a wonderful tool and i was always fortunate i cant 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 womens 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 lets unpack all of that and come back around. You are at the ic so youre 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 its 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 emergingmarket 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 its 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 wakeup 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 weve 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 dont 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 weve also seen oftentimes women are already not as productive in their entrepreneurial compared to men. Its 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, ecommerce 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 decisionmaking is most geared to mail decisionmaking. [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 dont 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 dont 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 frontline 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 weve 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 oneoff shortterm 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 genderbased 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. Im 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 PublicHealth 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. Its 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 th