Q&A: UN Women deputy director on the cost of not prioritizing women during COVID-19

NEW YORK — UN Women Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia recently posed a scenario that might be familiar to some 11 million families whose daughters might not return to school this year. There’s one computer at home. Who is getting it to use for online school, the brother or the sister? “Typically it's going to be the brother, because the girl is looked upon as household help. It's always the girls’ education that suffers. Investing in girls’ education is probably the single best development investment that you can make, because when you educate a girl, you change her life, her family's life, her community's life,” Bhatia said in an interview with Devex. UN Women has estimated that 47 million will slip into poverty in just one year as a result of the pandemic. A rise in child marriage, a spike in violence against women, loss of education, and income for girls and women can all be traced to the economic crises onset by the pandemic. But few governments are considering stimulus packages with gender lenses. Bhatia spoke with Devex about how stimulus packages and pandemic-related policies should address the specific needs of women and girls, and why this is not happening as much as necessary. “The crisis has really shone a light on the fact that governments, by and large, are not investing sufficiently in infrastructure to support working women.” --— Anita Bhatia, deputy executive director, UN Women This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How has UN Women reprioritized its focus as a result of the pandemic’s secondary effects on women? One of the most obvious things that happened during the pandemic that we knew we had to address immediately was the rise in violence against women. What the pandemic did was it brought this issue starkly into the public spotlight. We had a number of heads of state talking about the public policy measures that they have to implement to combat the rising violence. We are also bringing to the attention of finance ministers and financial institutions the need to have a focus on gender in their economic stimulus packages. We are asking for an emphasis on social protection, on the resumption of reproductive and gynecological health services for women, and are pushing for other agenda items in the stimulus packages. Do most of the stimulus packages you have seen so far contain gender-specific focuses, or prioritization? No. I think there are very few packages that are actually designed with women in mind. Governments have been under tremendous pressure to just get the money and get it out. So, it's kind of hard to pause and say, “How do we target women?” There are some cases where governments have thought about how the money is going to go to women-owned businesses. There is some thinking about how we can make sure that women can get cash transfers easily. In Togo, the government adopted this measure to get money out through mobile phones so that you wouldn't be touching cash and transmitting the virus. We know that women benefited from that. But by and large, of all of the policy measures that we have looked at, the explicit reference to women is not there yet. “Most governments are going to have to do probably a second round of the stimulus packages … as they do the second phase, they can now take the opportunity to do it with a gender lens.” --— What measures are most important for these packages to include, when it comes to benefiting women and girls, in particular? The child care issue is absolutely enormous. How will women who want to go back into the workforce go, if they have to take care of a child who's not going to school? The crisis has really shone a light on the fact that governments, by and large, are not investing sufficiently in infrastructure to support working women. Governments have to actually make provisions for care to support women in their transition back to the workforce. The second is targeting women-owned businesses in loan programs, because there are going to be concessional loans available. We are asking that governments target these women-owned businesses. Obviously, we need governments to pay attention to issue violence against women because that actually saps productivity. And in other measures that they're undertaking, we want them to make sure that they're actually thinking through how to reach women so that the money doesn't just disappear. And so far, you are not seeing comprehensive solutions to tackle this problem? Not enough. My basic message is as follows: Most governments are going to have to do probably a second round of the stimulus packages. The size of the problem is so large that I think governments have to keep going back and doing more stimulus packages. So as they do the second phase, they can now take the opportunity to do it with a gender lens. Given these setbacks, do you think the 10-year timeline for reaching the Sustainable Development Goals still makes sense? Absolutely, yes. The SDGs are so important because if we had actually made more progress on those SDGs, we probably would not be in the situation we're in today. The SDGs are fundamental to changing the world we live in. And I'm so glad we have them as something to aspire to achieve, because it sets us on a very clear path for the future.