Reuters World News - Women on the frontlines

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

A special episode of stories about women by women for International Women’s Day: Inside a maternity clinic in Afghanistan Abortion fights in the Americas The widening gender gap at hedge funds The macro view Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women march around the world for International Women's Day. It's a rallying cry for equality and a celebration. But just how far have we come? Today, a special episode of Reuters World News, where we bring you stories about women by women on the front lines. It's March 8th. I'm Kim Vinald in London. This is Charlotte Greenfield in Bamion.

I'm Maria Martinez in Berlin. I'm Nell McKenzie in London. I'm Nandida Bow. in Washington, D.C. I'm Sarah Morland in Mexico City. We start in the snow-topped mountains of Afghanistan's Bamian province. This area's rugged natural beauty is a killer during winter. Piles of snow cut off inhabitants from medical care.

A woman dies every two hours during pregnancy and childbirth across the country. Our correspondent Charlotte Greenfield got a rare look inside a hospital clinic. There, the UN Refugee Agency is training local women as midwives. We're in a hospital in Bamayan City, where a training program for around 40 young women from villages around the province takes place. The plan is for them to return to their villages, where they can use this knowledge and skills

to help the women in their rural communities. I'm just in the hospital wards where two women are recovering from giving birth. One of them gave birth just a few hours ago. The trainee midwife is helping to check her blood pressure under the guidance of a trained health staff. Health workers here said that they can provide women with good care, but they just can't reach most of the women in Bamiyan in surrounding provinces.

Many of them end up cut off during winter by snow or have to make harrowing journeys to give birth. From the hospital, we travelled on a highway out of the city, which eventually turned into a remote bumpy road. to the Flaadi Valley. The difficulty in getting in and out, particularly by car, makes it really difficult for women giving birth.

We just spoke to one woman, Aziza, who sadly lost her baby four months ago. Aziza describes the pain of losing her baby. She said it was very hard to lose a son she had nurtured in her womb for nine months. The kind of journeys women have to make, sometimes for miles on donkeys, are underlined by Aziza's story. She didn't have access to a vehicle,

and no doctor or ambulance could reach her in time for help. This is Charlotte Greenfield in Bamayand. Now to a very different environment for those of us who identify as women, the world of central banking and finance. Maria Martinez in Berlin has been looking at the numbers, and when it comes to the field of economics, they just don't add up. Maria Martinez, nice to speak to you.

Nice to be here with you. So how are we women doing when it comes to the economy on the world stage? So at first side, it could seem that we are doing much better because nowadays we have women heading the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the US Treasury, the European Central Bank. However, and at the surface thing start not looking that well, women represent between 10% and 24% of the top global positions. Why is this happening? So the first issue is that we have less women than men studying economics.

And then if they decide to do a PhD in economics, we can see that at the entry level at university at academia, there's 50, 50% of female men, but then if you go to more senior positions, the percentage of women goes down. What about, you know, the actual impact of not having women in these leadership positions? So if we don't have women arriving to top positions at top universities, this means that structurally we are investing less money in certain research topics. and because university is framing policy, this also has an impact in our economic policies. We have work to do, that is clear. Thank you so much, Maria Martinez in Berlin.

Thank you, Kim. From the macro to the micro, women in hedge funds. Now McKenzie in London has a new report out today on the numbers. Hi, Nell. Hi, Kim. So this is one of the least diverse areas of finance. talk me through it. The percentage of women that holds senior positions at European hedge funds has more than halved since 2021. So currently in Europe, 8% of women today holds senior positions in hedge

funds. I thought we'd gotten past that. I thought, you know, at boardroom level, we'd all come to understand that having a diverse range of voices and opinions and backgrounds was good for business. As the economy turns and as geopolitical tensions heat up, it looks like bias towards fear and towards risk-taking. It's only going to get worse for women in hedge funds because the way these things have worked academically, there are lots of studies about how when people perceive a more uncertain time, they cling to what they know. What if the women who you've spoken to told you about what it's like to be a woman in the hedge fund world, if there's so few of them? Yeah, so I think a lot of people talk, particularly hedge funds are about bottom lines, right? So a lot of people tell me, men and women say, if you're going to be in a hedge fund, no one cares whether you're a woman, they just care about your bottom line if you can make money.

But the thing about that is, is it takes a while working in a hedge fund before somebody gives you the opportunity to make money. So all of the biases come out and they really inhibit women's career progression in hedge funds. Nell McKenzie. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Kim. In Washington, D.C., the battle over women's reproductive rights will be a key issue in the 2024 presidential election race. Our White House correspondent, Nandita Bose, joins me now to talk about her reporting on the Biden administration's efforts to keep abortion top of its agenda. Hi, Nandita. Hey.

So the White House is lending a hand in state-level battles over abortion rights. How is it doing that and why? So they have divided their fights for abortion rights and states into three broad categories. If it is a state run by Republicans and has a Republican governor who is trying to maybe push for more restrictions, the White House categorizes such a state, like, say, for example, Texas or Florida, as an extremist state. And what they're doing there is trying to fight restrictions by getting all the Democrats together, trying to stop bills that are moving through the legislature. Then there are category of states the White House classifies as access battleground states. North Carolina, for example, has a Democratic governor, but the legislature is Republican-controlled. Most of the southern states in the United States have banned abortion or have severely restricted abortion rights, and North Carolina sits very close to the southern states and is the only state that still allows abortion up to 16 weeks.

So it is women and their bodies who are at the center of all of this. What will women voters do? How do you think they're likely to respond? We did see a lot of women voters come out during the midterms, who overwhelmingly boarded for Democrats. And that was a trend that obviously gives Democrats and President Biden and this administration a lot of hope in trying to repeat that success for the 24 presidential elections.

Thanks, Nandita. Abortion isn't just a contentious issue in the United States. A poignant press conference in San Salvador. Campaign is outlining the case of a woman known only as Beatrice. In 2013, she was forced to carry a pregnancy to full term because of El Salvador's abortion ban. The fetus didn't make it, her own health deteriorated, and she died four years later.

Now, the intra-American court of human rights is expected to make a ruling. Sarah Morland is in Mexico City for Reuters and has been following the case. there's definitely a movement for change. So Beatriz was being helped along her legal journey by feminist collectives, abortion rights groups, activists, who worked really hard to publicise our case. A case made huge ways in self-drawn society.

And the hope is that eventually this can actually generate change. We end with a reminder that the only way the world changes for women is if we change it. Michelle Guatimba in Zimbabwe is doing exactly that. She runs a small farm in the Tesoro Greenfields, employing mostly women. Many of them are survivors of gender-based violence. I came on this farm four years ago. We started off doing grains, and we have now ventured into other cash crops such as tobacco.

There was a lot of women who would then come to us asking for food or for shelter or somewhere to run away from. So we ended up just employing all of these women and females that have gone into agriculture, thrive. Obviously, it's something that is challenging and intimidating because it's male-dominated. But it's so rewarding. And that is it for today. Wishing y'all, all of y'all, a happy international women's day. We'll be back on Thursday with our usual mix of headlines. In the meantime, you can find more trusted news at Reuters.com.