>> We estimate that about 11 million girls will not go back to school ever after the pandemic.

So that's a big setback.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking at the impact the pandemic has had on women globally.

How much progress has been eroded in the wake of job losses and a rise in gender-based violence and economic inequality?

And how might that trend be reversed as our societies rebuild?

I'll ask one of the world's top experts, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and former deputy president of South Africa, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Don't worry.

I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Technically, my boss is a woman, so do you mind if I exit this conversation?

>> Not until you mind the gap, Boris -- the gender gap.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> In what ways does the fact that you're a woman affect the way that you see the job?

>> Do you know, that's a question I find very difficult to answer.

I've never been a man prime minister.

>> In 1985, when the U.K.'s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, delivered that zinger, she was one of only a few female heads of government in the world.

A decade later, as then First Lady Hillary Clinton landed this line in Beijing, that number was still in the single digits.

>> If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights once and for all.

>> The outlook has improved significantly in the last 25 years.

Today, there are roughly two dozen female heads of state.

That's still less than 10% of the top spots in global governance.

And, of course, we are making more countries.

But many of those women made a very short list of leaders whose response to coronavirus has been globally praised, like Germany's Angela Merkel, Slovakia's Zuzana Caputová, and, of course, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, who won her re-election in a landslide during the crisis, in part because of how well she handled it.

>> Your immediate reaction when you heard there were no active cases of COVID-19 remaining in New Zealand.

>> I -- I did a little dance.

[ Laughs ] >> Overall the pandemic's impact on women and girls has been devastating, eroding decades of progress in both the home and in the workplace.

Women make up a reported 39% of the world's workforce, but they account for more than half of the jobs lost over the past year.

NPR reported that in the United States, the number of working women has fallen to a level not seen since 1988.

>> Women leaving the workforce in these numbers, it's a national emergency and it demands a national solution.

>> The United Nations also reports sexual and domestic violence have skyrocketed globally, calling it the shadow pandemic of 2020.

And the gender gap for poverty is also widening, with women rapidly becoming the majority of the world's poorest, particularly young women, many of them with children.

The ironic part here is that so many of the essential workers, the people who cared for the sick over the past year are themselves women, a reported 70% of community health and social workers around the world.

Many of them risk being left behind in the recovery.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka championed women's causes throughout her career and has served as the Executive Director of U.N. Women, the United Nations Gender Equality Advocate since 2013.

A child of South Africa's apartheid, she knows all too well how gender bias, racism and inequality intersect.

And at this precarious moment for the world, she also has a lot to say about how female leadership could change that.

Here's our conversation.

Phumzile, thanks so much for joining me today.

>> Thank you so much for having me.

>> So you've been at the United Nations for almost a decade now.

I'd like to talk to you a little bit about just the trajectory of women's rights and the progress that has been made over the course of your tenure.

What's been most startling?

What are the takeaways that we can be optimistic about?

>> It used to be that gender equality was a woman's business, but we used this last decade especially to push it to be everyone's business, to be the media's business, to be men and boys' business, to be sports persons' business, to be private sector's business.

We've not reached the peak that we would like to reach, but it's now difficult for anyone who represents something to not care.

And we are hoping that now we can turn that into actions on their part.

We now need scale and we need bolder actions.

>> Globalization has driven extraordinary wealth.

There's been this rise of a global middle class.

Are women keeping up with that trajectory?

Where are the places where we can say globalization is truly giving women the kind of opportunities that we should be proud of?

>> The improvement of the economic status of women is probably driven more by their own education because women have been increasingly graduating on top of their class and, in many countries, doing better than than boys.

The macroeconomic policies of most countries are not gender responsive.

One area that is of concern for us, for instance, is just equal pay.

The fact that you still have predominantly women who are not paid the same amount of money for work of equal value, the positioning of women in the private sector in particular, it doesn't put women in the commanding heights of economies.

And, of course, there is still a high level of segregation where women are positioned in the softer side of business even when they have the skills to be in the part of the business that makes the money.

>> When you came first to the United Nations, when you come here from South Africa and you see on the one hand an enormous amount of news attention and headlines to gender issues driven most importantly by #MeToo campaign over the last few years and still with an enormous amount of energy, how does it strike you?

I mean, do you see the Americans focusing on the right issues in terms of gender?

>> Well, harassment of women at the workplace is a significant issue.

So they were spot-on in making that a big issue.

When we were in Beijing 25 years ago, when Hillary Clinton said women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights, she was stating the obvious.

But this was not obvious to everybody.

People used to treat women's issues as just development issues, not rights.

Many countries did not have, for instance, legislation that criminalizes violence against women, especially domestic violence.

And the denial of opportunities to women was not seen as a violation of human rights.

That statement was reminding everybody that this is the case.

And in the last 20 years, we have seen the women's movement making that case over and over again.

So we evolved jurisprudence that did not exist to the extent that it exists today of women's oppression as a violation of our rights.

But we have not reached a point where there is a correlation between ending violation in law, realizing those rights, and then having the means in terms of programs and initiatives that then advance women economically and otherwise.

So we still have all of those issues needing to be pushed forward together.

>> And, you know, when you say women's rights are human rights, we also know that the agenda, the global agenda for human rights is not where we want it to be right now.

There's a lot of hypocrisy coming from my own country.

There's a lot of whitewashing being done by countries with horrible human rights records.

What is irritating you the most right now?

>> I mean, the obsession about controlling women's bodies is really something that also shocked me when I got to the U.N.

It is an issue in every commission on the status of women.

It doesn't matter what the theme is.

That always comes up as one issue that divide countries.

So if you consider that women's reproductive rights and health are so fundamental to women's ability to prosper, to progress, for women not to have the freedom in every country, to have access to contraceptives, to make decisions about their body the way they want to, this is something that irritates me immensely.

But of course, I must be careful not to be too irritated and be paralyzed.

I must keep working on it, keep inching in, keep winning people on the other side so that we can make progress.

>> Now the point, it's important because so many people think that, okay, you move from being a developing country to a developed country as if everyone inexorably is always on the same path.

And yet we see that actually you can backslide quite a bit on many of these issues.

Look at what's happening in many states across the United States right now.

I mean, on fundamental issues of reproductive health, countries are moving in a direction that you would think would not be possible right now.

>> Yeah, absolutely.

There is a lot of things that have shocked me here.

I just look at the way there is an effort to strip people of their voting rights.

I mean, I never thought something like that could happen in the U.S.

If you are not from the U.S., this being the place where democracy has existed for such a long time, I just would not have imagined that was even possible.

I cannot imagine anything like that happening even in a new, not so established democracy like South Africa and many other countries, developing countries.

So it just shows that all of us have some homework to do in our countries.

There's places where we're very strong, but there are places where we have to work on.

But when it comes to women's issues, there are issues that are universal.

Violence against women is a universal challenge for all countries, irrespective of their level of development.

And the representation of women is a challenge for all countries.

And when you think about underrepresentation of women, there is a correlation between underrepresentation of women and slow development in all areas because when you have less women, you do not have fighters inside the room who are continuously pushing the envelope and pushing the agenda.

>> Both of these issues you raise -- violence against women and underrepresentation of women -- both of these things are getting exacerbated with the pandemic, much more violence against women worldwide especially, and many of them being trapped in homes, effectively, environments where they can't escape it.

And secondarily, women are absolutely getting hit much worse in terms of unemployment, layoffs, furloughs and all the rest when they're already doing so much of the work in the informal economy.

When you look at what's happened with the pandemic and the response, how has that affected your job?

How has that affected your outlook on the world for women?

>> It's certainly been a setback.

I mean, it's not like we had made grand progress, but the limited progress is being compromised.

Women in the labor market -- We could be going back to a situation where a woman's place is at home and a man's place is at work.

That needs policy interventions in order for countries to be conscious about not developing an architecture of the labor market that is for men.

Girls education -- We had made not perfect progress, but it was going the right way in many countries.

Many children who did not go back to school after the pandemic in many countries are girls, and they have not gone back in some cases because of pregnancies, which is not from consensual sex, increase in trafficking, increase in child marriage.

We estimate that about 11 million girls will not go back to school after the pandemic.

So that's a big setback.

And of course, when we think about women and work, women have lost jobs in such large numbers because they weigh in the value chain of work in those levels where jobs are not secured, they don't have benefits, they are easy to lay off.

They don't have savings if they are in the informal sector to maintain themselves so that they can go back to pre-pandemic economic activity.

And part of what is missing there is decent work.

If women were mostly decent work, they would stand a chance of surviving the pandemic.

And when we look at fiscal stimulus, we want to see the correlation between how the package has been put together and the response to these issues that are affecting women directly.

I must say we're encouraged by the U.S. package.

It has a lot of the right things that we've seen, but there are a number of countries where the package is so gender-blind and we are having to make approaches to government to point that out and to make sure that we ask them to look at the package and make sure that they respond to the women as well.

>> I was just about to ask you, with all the trillions of dollars being spent, including $1.9 trillion just approved in the United States, I mean, this is bigger than any kind of fiscal expansion in the U.S., frankly, since World War II.

So, I mean, it's wonderful to hear you say that you think that this is actually being done in an intelligent way.

Talk a little bit about what you think it's doing that's targeted in a way that's going to be useful to address this huge hit that women have taken here in the United States.

>> The fact that it is going to enable women to continue to have food, you know, this basic thing when it's not there at home, it's a woman's headache, that it's going to enable women to be able to keep a roof over their head, again another big problem for women.

But only about 10% of the packages that have come out since the start of the pandemic have had a dedicated window that addresses the issue of women.

So we are continuously engaging with governments about repurposing their packages so that they can respond to women in the developing countries.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, the packages are not that big, but there is something.

And in those countries, the women are in the informal sector.

And because the informal sector is made up of business that are not registered, they really fall between the cracks, and the informal sector is just too big in Africa and in Asia.

>> Are younger people of both genders thinking differently about gender relations and rights and equality, in your view?

Is some of this just it is gonna change demographically?

Because these people are just not gonna tolerate the behaviors of the 1950s-style men anymore?

>> Definitely.

The younger generation has a refreshing radical impatience, which really helps.

Even in this collision that I'm talking about, it's been so good to have the young people because everyone is on an equal platform -- member states, young people, sports people, private sector and everybody -- and the young people have really been pushing and creating real agency.

But on climate, definitely they are giving it much more serious attention.

And girls in particular -- certainly girls are much stronger on climate, and just -- there's just stronger leaders, period.

And it's refreshing to see that happen.

We still have residues of chauvinism and boys who do not identify with the thinking that is progressive.

But it's much better than the guys of my generation, that's for sure.

Definitely much better.

>> I mean, look, it may seem like a small issue in the context of the pandemic, but before the pandemic hit, I'm just thinking about women's soccer and how you had these spokeswomen that suddenly were like, "No, no, why are we doing this?

And you're going to pay us one fifth, one tenth of what the guys make?

Are you absolutely kidding me?

It's not entertaining.

I'm not worth anything?"

And I just -- Growing up, I couldn't have imagined women doing that in that space.

And suddenly it was the most obvious and natural thing.

And that to me feels generational.

>> Yeah.

You know, we have a goodwill ambassador of ours -- Marta de Silva, Brazil.

And if you see what she earns compared to her male counterparts who don't even feature in the ranking of people who have scored goals, you really realize how unfair it is.

And she trains just as hard.

You know, she does everything that you are required to do in order to be an elite athlete.

>> And, you know, it's a good place for us to come together because I think one of the biggest turning points in coming out of the pandemic is going to be the successful hosting, God willing, of the Olympics in Tokyo this summer.

So maybe we can see some more of that with everybody together.

>> Yeah, no, definitely.

We're hoping and also encouraging.

And I'll give a shout-out to the International Olympic Committee.

We will have 49% women participating in the sports.

That is really phenomenal.

They've come a long way.

And of course, by the time they go to the next Olympics after Tokyo, they definitely would have reached 50%.

So I'm quite glad and it's encouraging to see how serious they are taking the issues.

>> Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, so nice to see you.

So appreciate the work that you're doing and thanks for being on "GZERO World."

>> Thank you very much.

It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

>> March is, of course, Women's History Month.

And on March 8th, women and men around the world flooded the streets for International Women's Day.

Here are just some of the most powerful images from that day of both celebration and a protest.

>> I'm here in support of all women.

We really need equality, and we need to dismantle the patriarchy so we get the change that we all deserve.

>> It is 2021!

Why are we still dealing with these issues?

Why is this acceptable?

>> And now to "Puppet Regime," where Angela Merkel looks around at all the men still running so much of the world.

Roll that tape.

>> Yeah, guten morgen.

Thank you for joining this Zoom.

In honor of Women's History Month, I would like to raise the issue of gender inequality.

>> Hey, equality is communist, and Brazil will never be communist.

>> Plus, Angie, what do you have to complain about?

You are most powerful woman in world.

>> First of all, it's Angela to you or Chancellor Merkel, if you're nasty.

Second of all, let me remind you that barely 20% of all government ministers in the whole world are women.

And in Russia, it's only 3, 3 out of 30 Russian ministers.

>> Fine.

But we treat female independent journalists just the same as male ones -- very badly.

>> You know, technically, my boss is a woman, so do you mind if I exit this conversation?

>> Not until you mind the gap, Boris -- the gender gap.

Women in the United Kingdom earn 16% less than men.

>> Well, that's still better than in Brazil, where it's 20%.

>> Brazil had a woman president!

She was a communist!

>> They say it will take 70 years to close the gender gap in South Asia.

By then, I plan to be prime minister 14 more times.

>> Yeah, here at Facebook, we can help you with that.

>> Mr. Zuckerberg, good of you to chime in.

Why don't you tell us why three quarters of people working in the tech industry are men?

>> Well, that's just -- that's just how the algorithm works.

Don't blame me.

>> Enough malarkey.

Here in Americ-- >> Please, no lectures from America.

Only one quarter of U.S. lawmakers are women.

Until recently, even Saudi Arabia had more than that.

>> [ Chuckles ] True story.

True story.

>> Yeah, okay, enough.

I think we are all understanding the problem here.

Oh, what's that?

We have another person dialing in.

>> I'm 7 years old, and all I want to know is why is there only one other female puppet in this?

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you see, and of course you do because we trust each other.

This is a no-judgment zone at "GZERO."

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...