the coronavirus has put inequality in
the spotlight
women are misrepresented in many
industries and the pandemics made that
worse
consultancy mckinsey says women are
almost twice as likely as men to lose
their job due to covert
far fewer women work in science despite
girls outpacing boys in school
women are needed like never before as
the cover death toll continues to rise
well the crisis has ranked relationships
families and lives
it's put back progress on many social
fronts including women's rights
we sent out our reporters to find out
how some women around the world view
covert 19. uh spiritually
foreign
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women provide the bulk of work as
caregivers looking after the young
the old and the sick in germany most
nurses are women and they often earn
significantly less than their male
colleagues
here in the hospital there is a strict
protocol when it comes
to putting on your protective clothing
but for kathleen berger
it has become a routine she is one of
the many female
nurses who have been pushing their
limits they unite for a year now
taking care of corona patients
the physical strain is enormous working
in this kind of gears exhausting
but the psychological component plays a
big role too
we always have to take care of
critically ill patients that's part of
our job
but now we have seriously ill patients
who can also endanger
us that is really stressful
stressful is also how derta hermann
would describe her last year
she works as a nurse in an old people's
home in berlin
the pandemic made her job even harder
and again
the burden of carrying for society's
elderly forced mainly on women
luckily men are increasingly interested
in being a nurse my husband is also one
but otherwise it's mainly women probably
because of the pay
if it were a male domain then women
would also earn very different salaries
more than 90 of the people fighting the
daily battles on the nursing front are
women
and they earn up to 10 percent less than
their male counterparts
according to the german federation of
trade unions
the chances of promotion are slim and
they often work nights
dr hammond says she appreciated the
gesture when people around germany
stood at their windows at the beginning
of the pandemic and applauded the
nation's nurses and carers
but it was no more than a gesture now
she says women
also need to play a role in changing how
society treats them
my wish for women in this profession is
that they stop putting themselves down
and that people are aware of their
contribution
people need to understand that we are
not just nurses or cleaners or kitchen
workers
that the world only goes around when we
all work together as a team
one of us can't get by without the other
enough
catherine berger knows that too after
work she likes to go for a walk in the
woods to switch off
for her too it is important to support
people who work in care
design corona may be here to stay and we
need to develop
strategies we need enough staff enough
equipment
and whatever else it takes to help us do
our jobs
both nurses are agreed these
improvements have to come and
they have to come soon
i spoke to tatenda a phd candidate at
the united nations university merit
and maastricht university and asked what
the world is missing out on
if women's voices in science aren't
heard
yes it's a matter of uh life and death
in that uh
not only does covet 19 affect
people from the racial standpoint but
also from the gender standpoint
and there is research that shows that
covet 19 may actually
affect women's bodies differently and
also there are social effects that
related to the disease
that may actually impact women more for
example women are the primary caregivers
of their households
and so having to work from home and
taking care of their children may
actually affect women more than it does
men tell me more about mutual
cooperation and teamwork when it comes
to men and women working together in
science
to uh to work on not only beating this
crisis but also
equality within the business
uh i'll give my example uh for with my
collaborators i've worked with john
francois and obviously
on a paper regarding the social effects
of kobe 19 in africa
and i think that their collaboration and
treating me as an equal
i was allowed me to air my views as a
woman
and also to highlight the gender aspect
of covet 19 particularly on women in
business
and and their careers and this actually
helps out
also to take out the emotional turmoil
that's associated with sexism
within science and within the academic
profession as well
so i commend male collaborators who
treat women as equals mainly because
they're actually doing the work
related to combating sexism within uh
science and in the academic field
overall
what else did you find in in in your
work
in how covert 19's affecting the economy
and female entrepreneurs in ghana
uh we found that uh cover 90
of uh we found that in general women
have less sales than men
and the effect of their previous sales
on their future sales
affects men women more than men and so
we find that because
women right now during due to the
pandemic
have to stay at home and take care of
their children their sales for their
products that they're selling
are really low and so this will then
obviously impact their future business
prospects
and these are things that we need to
look into in terms of the pandemic and
that
there's not only the the health effect
there's also the social
effect that may necessarily disadvantage
female entrepreneurs compared to
to male entrepreneurs this is not only
particular in the ghana case or to
entrepreneurship this also translates to
just women who are working from home and
whose
careers have been affected by the
pandemic
so attendo what advice would you give to
young women who aspire to pursuing
a career in science say
i would say that align yourselves with
people who want you to do well
if you're in a situation where there's
too much sexism and your voice is not
heard and people don't want you to
succeed
i would advise you to find ways of
getting out of that
situation if you can always find people
champion your success
find mentors who want you to do well
work in labs with people
well i know that it's not easy because
this is a male-dominated field
but there are some women and men as well
who actually want
to help women do well in their careers
you heard it from tatenda thank you very
much for being on the show today
thank you very much over now to our
science correspondent derek williams
he's been looking into your questions on
the coronavirus this one coming from an
anonymous viewer
does the vaccine make you infertile
since the start of the pandemic we've
seen one corona virus myth after another
so
it's no wonder that vaccines have
spawned
uh many more this one though that that
mrna vaccines
cause infertility in women is
especially worrisome i think because it
appears to be having a real
impact on vaccine uptake among
younger women um like a lot of fake news
that gains traction the infertility myth
uses
science to distort rather than to
clarify
in this case it twists the scientific
fact that mrna vaccines
train the immune system to recognize a
structure
on the outer surface of the coronavirus
called
the spike protein the disinformation
campaigns
build on that with a claim that the
spike protein resembles a protein found
in the placenta
that protects and nurtures a developing
fetus
that means the claim continues that an
immune system
primed to detect spike proteins in order
to attack
and destroy the coronavirus can also
mistakenly
attack and destroy a placenta causing
women to either be infertile or
to miscarry this is not true
for a couple of fundamental reasons
first
the defense cells in the immune system
react
in a highly specific way to the proteins
that they've been programmed to detect
they have to
because proteins are only made up of
20 different molecular building blocks
called
amino acids but our bodies can produce
at least 20
000 different proteins from them and
possibly a whole lot more
so of course there can be structural
molecular overlap in in many different
proteins
which is why the immune system has to be
so specific
and second is the fact that the placenta
protein in question
turns out not even to be very similar in
molecular terms
to the viruses spike protein so short
and sweet there's zero
evidence that being vaccinated against
covet 19
affects a woman's fertility in any way
and actually
a growing mound of evidence that it
doesn't
you