Melinda French Gates on Gender Equality | SDG Moment | United Nations

French Gates, let's bring you in. You've been waiting patiently. What do you see as the greatest barriers to advancing gender equality during the recovery and beyond? How do we overcome that? And I think speak broadly to the nature of Goal 5, right? The cross-cutting nature of Goal 5 and how that informs our success on all the 17 goals as it relates to the 2030 agenda. Over to you. Sure. Well, and it's great to see Seema in this role in UN Women and I think she's been very articulate about the issues. We saw what COVID-19 did was it laid bare the structural inequities that already existed in society. Women have been marginalized in their homes, their communities, the workforce for a very long time. And so when you look at what's been going on in our economies, you're seeing the International Labor Organization, for instance, is saying women are still going to lose two million jobs this year on top of the 13 million women that are out of work. And why is that? At the same time, men are going back to their jobs at a very swift rate. They're regaining their jobs. Well, the reason is that women's unpaid work and unpaid caregiving burdens have gone up while their job opportunities have gone down. And so we need to look at this barrier and figure out what is good policy that can help women with that unpaid care so that they can do what they want and return to their jobs. As a foundation, we really look at three key areas. We call them cash, care, and data. If you look at the economic recoveries going on around the world, cash means good social protection programs for women, putting money in women's hands. Caregiving means having good policies so you subsidize child care or you put policies in place like paid family medical leave. And by data, we mean collecting the data so that we can know exactly where to pinpoint programming as governments, as the private sector, as foundations so that we can have a full and robust return of our economies. If we invest in social protection, we can lift 100 million women out of poverty. If we invest in the right way in caregiving, we can actually add 3 trillion of GDP across the world. So these are programs that countries should look at in policies, whether you're low, middle, or high income, so that you can get a full and just economic return. We've got to put women at the center, and we will get return to our economies that we want globally. Let me stay with you, Ms. French-Gates. In numerous conversations I would have with Ms. Bowers's predecessor, Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, we talked about how good policy was important, but good implementation of policy was also very important. And that is always lacking in terms of the implementation of the targets you are seeking to achieve in Goal 5. That's an important peg, right? Good policy, but also the implementation. What do you make of that connection? Well, I think you're exactly right. And so what we're seeing in country after country, we're seeing governments make investments. Let me give you a couple examples. For instance, in Kenya, they've made sure that there's more opportunities for caregiving. So there's a great micro business called Kidogo. It exists so that women can set up these businesses, but then 12,000 women have used this child care during the crisis, put their children in child care. And what we're seeing of the families and women who use that child care service, they're actually getting a 24% return in their own income. We're seeing South Africa put in great social protection payments for families and some specifically around child care, because they know women can't go back to work if they have to care for their children at home. And lastly, Pakistan at an enormous scale has looked at digital finance, and they are making sure that women not only have mobile phones, but they know how to use them. They know how to use a digital financial account on their phone, and they put social protection payments through those digital accounts. And what we know from other countries around the world is you put those digital payments in the hands of women, they spend it on their family. And that's why governments want to get it directly in the hands of women. So Pakistan is building not just for now, they've got 16.9 million new families using digital money. They're putting in place now during COVID-19 something that will sustain them over the long term. That's good programming and good policy around the globe.