 Hi Latifah. And I think shall we start right now? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, sure. All right. First of all, thank you everyone for joining us today. Today we have Dr. Sarah Stevano from the Economics Department of SWAS and Sarah is a development and feminist political economist focusing on the political economy of work, well-being, development policy, and household. Perhaps before we start, I could frame a bit of our discussion today. We'll share a bit of anecdotes and numbers on why I've been looking at what globally, especially right now, women are facing a high exposure to COVID-19. Given the majority of our frontliners in health care, social care, our extent, and other essential services are women. And a recent report by a world budget actually highlighted how inadequate personal protective equipment are exposing 77% of women in health care services and 83% of women in social services are vulnerable to COVID-19 infection. And this is a serious matter, especially when yesterday received a heartbreaking news of a heavily pregnant NHS nurse that passed away and the baby was saved, but now the baby is without a mother. And the doctors and our carers and NHS workers, our essential frontliners, every Thursday, but we basically are deaf to the needs. And millennial movement imposed by governments around the world has actually put up on top of doing work at the office. They also have to take care of family expected to work and also children since now schools are closed. So this is a very relevant topic that we'll be discussing today and this is a topic that Sarah will be pressuring on and she'll be speaking about current pandemic from the feminist economics perspective. But before we begin just a few housekeeping announcements, this session is recorded. We will have two sessions. The first session, Sarah will be talking for 20 minutes. And the next session, we will answer your questions. So please do put up your questions in the chat room. We'll collate the questions within the first 40 minutes of this session. Well, I suppose that's it. Thank you again for joining us and Sarah. Thank you very much. Okay, so let me just pull this up. Yeah, thank you so much for the introduction and thank you also to the SAS Feminist Economics Network. So actually, can you just confirm that you can hear me fine? Yes, I can hear you. Yeah. Okay, that's great. And I also need to thank our students in the Open Economics Forum because they have been doing incredible work for putting this webinar series together. So I am incredibly grateful. And thank you also to all of you for joining us. It's many of you. And that's great. I hope you're joining us from many parts of the world, which is one of the one of the positive things, like of the current situation to be able to talk like a few webinars and so forth. So like, I hope we can do more of this, like also when the crisis is over. But let me get into the feminist economics of COVID-19 so that we have hopefully more time for questions at the end. And I would like to start with a basic question. So what does it mean to take a feminist economic perspective to the current pandemic? And so to me, this means analysing how both the public health crisis and economic crisis have differentiated impacts and how existing and new forms of gender oppression might be strengthened or produced under the current circumstances. Crucially though, I think it is not possible to fully understand gender inequalities unless we examine how they intersect and articulate with other forms of class and race inequality. And I think this needs to be at the core of feminist analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic. So to have a take on the multiplicity of inequalities, I think we're better equipped with a social reproduction lens. So just to be clear, what is a social reproduction? Social reproduction is a broad notion that refers to the totality of everyday practices and more structured long-term processes that are needed for the reproduction of human life and for the reproduction of the workforce as well. So these include the unpaid work that often takes place in the household, such as buying food, cooking, cleaning, caring and so forth, but also the forms of paid and wage work that are entailed in the provision of healthcare, of education, social services and infrastructure at the societal level. So to take a social reproduction perspective means taking a step back and focusing on what is necessary for workers, to be able to wake up every morning and go to work and for production at large to take place on a daily basis. So of course a lot has been written already on COVID-19, not least from a feminist perspective. So for example, some weeks ago I read A Peace in the Atlantic by Helen Lewis, entitled The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism, which provides a sobering picture of the exacerbation of all existing gender inequalities that we are starting to see and we should expect to see more in the coming weeks and months. And of course this is very critical and we will look at some of the inequalities later on and of course Latif has started this conversation by mentioning some anecdotal evidence on this. However I also think that we need to remember how every crisis provides an opportunity for change and I think this crisis is rather unique in that it has suddenly put the brightest spotlight on forms of essential work that capitalism has long sought to make invisible and devalue. So to use the words of Pippi Battaccia who's a theorist of social reproduction, this crisis has temporarily forced capitalism to prioritize life-making, over-profit making. So I think our task as feminists is to make sure that the centrality of life is the pillar on which we're going to build what will come after this crisis. So let me move on to the four questions that I was given, which take us on a little journey from how the situation was before the crisis, what has changed, what the likely outcomes are and what can be done. And I will structure my reflections on two themes that are essential in feminists thinking, household and work, and I will try to highlight some of the interconnections between households and work. So what was the situation prior to the pandemic? It is clear that there were already many dimensions of the organization of economies and life that required change from a feminist perspective. So many feminists, and I think most notably Nancy Fraser, have been talking about a crisis of care brought about by the intrinsic contradictions of a capitalist system that needs social reproduction, but essentially does not want to pay for it. And I think this can be seen very clearly through a focus on households, because households have become increasingly responsible for the provision of welfare. So this is a process that has been called the privatization of welfare provisioning or the privatization of social reproduction that unfolded during the neoliberal era. So the rolling back of the state, which was deliberately promoted by local politicians in the UK and the US started in the 1980s and imposed on many countries in the global south with the structural adjustment programs at the same time, has shifted the burden of provisioning from the state onto households. And so of course the impacts, the effects on households were differentiated, because the welfare households were able to outsource care provisioning and domestic work through hiring nannies and domestic workers, and often these workers are migrant women. And on the other hand, the majority of poorer households had to absorb these overgrown responsibilities by extending their working day, by taking up a variety of poorly paid and insecure jobs, and essentially trying to juggle more domestic work and paid work at the same time. And this bears a significant gender implication, so because we know very well that women and often also children are overwhelmingly responsible for domestic work. So alongside this, and I don't have really much time to go into this in detail, but I need to mention the importance also of looking at the process of financialization and how financialization has led to an increase in household debt, which is extremely high at the moment in many countries. And through financialization, households have also been further integrated into financial systems. So in contexts in countries that where financialization is more advanced, we have households that not only are privately responsible for the welfare, but they're also overbunded with debt, and debt also serves the debt scope in many cases, and overexposed to financial risk. So you can see how households are not in the best place to take up the additional work and the additional responsibility to respond to this crisis. So we can keep this in mind for later. But in a way, and I will explain this later better, households are essential in the response to this crisis so far. And feminist economics has a vantage point on the household because unlike other branches of economics, it has spent a great deal of time studying households. So for example, fests have shown that if we look at households from the inside, then we see that households are places where gender inequalities are reproduced. And if we consider households through their external relations, we see that the work that takes place behind the walls of the household, although it has been constantly made invisible, it has been devalued and politicized. This work is absolutely vital for the survival and the maintenance of our economies and societies. So these broad changes at the household level cannot be understood unless we see the interconnections between production and reproduction. And this means looking also at what happened in the labor markets. So with the retreat of the state and the unfolding of globalization, there have been transformations in the labor markets that led to the rise of precarious, informal, casualized work. So it is clear that some of the gains that were made by workers in some contexts in the global north in terms of workers' rights and job security in two decades, the 1950s and the 1960s, were not a step in a long-term trajectory in that direction. But they were actually an exception to a global tendency to produce a further deterioration in working conditions across the world. So to put it in the words used by Bremen and Ponderlinden in terms of the informalization of work, it is clear that it is now the best following the rest and not the other way around. So here I think we need to take a global perspective and focus on the restructuring of global production that created a global division of labor that is gendered and racialized. And so with the relocation of manufacturing to the global south, many jobs, particularly for working as a pen, were lost in the global north. And although new jobs were indeed created in the global south, these jobs were premised upon the availability of chief labor and the employer's ability to maximize their profits in this way in the context of intensifying global competition. So the organization of global production in global value chains has consolidated and worsened forms of unequal exchange between the global south and the global north, where workers at the bottom and at the margins of global value chains in the global south work in conditions of poverty. And these are workers from almost always from poor backgrounds, they're often women and migrants. And so labor markets are vehicles for the reproduction of inequalities and this is captured by the conceptualization of the theorization of labor markets as gendered institutions by the young in the 1990s. What does it mean? It means that the disadvantage women face in various domains of life are carried into the labor market, and therefore women enter the labor force, but they are exposed to super exploitation. And of course, I think that this goes beyond a purely gender dimension, it has to do with different groups of work that suffer from discrimination and forms of oppression in various domains of life. So these indeed underpin the creation of segments of the labor market that offer bad jobs, workers that are considered to be unskilled or low skilled keep that in mind because we'll come back to this classification later. And we see a clustering of women or workers from poor backgrounds and from BAME backgrounds in these low skilled and unskilled jobs. And so these can be seen very clearly, for example, in the paid care sector, so healthcare education, domestic work, which is highly feminized, low paid and devalued. And it shows how the devaluation of work by women, by BAME people, by migrants, goes beyond the work in the household. So moving on to think about how what changed in these first few weeks and months now with the COVID-19 outbreak, what is the situation now? So it is clear that COVID-19 comes into play in an already critical situation in terms of inequalities and the squeeze on social reproduction. And I think two important things have happened that can be best understood from a first viewpoint. The first is the intensification of work that takes place in the household. And the second is the discovery for society at large beyond the feminist circles in a way of the centrality of care and social reproduction. So here something interesting is happening because on the one hand, those who continue to work are, of course, exposed to serious health risks. But on the other hand, these workers had to be recognized as essential. And so these, for example, forced the UK government to rebrand these workers as the key workers while up to a few weeks ago, these were considered to be low-skilled and unskilled workers. And I think this is very important for our perspective. And so this is a crisis that I think is different from previous economic crisis because it shakes a foundational element of our economies and societies, which is the organization of work. And to understand how this is being shaken, we need to consider the interplay between productive and reproductive work. And this is where I think feminist economists and political economists have an advantage. So what can be seen at the level of households is that, of course, the stay-at-home policy means very different things to different people. And the spectrum is very wide. It goes from those who do not have a home, those who cannot afford to stay at home because they rely on daily earnings, to those at the other end of the spectrum who have comfortable homes without their spaces and perhaps also living domestic workers. So this is itself, but also some of the responses to the COVID-19. So the school closures, the disruption in the provision of care in care homes and informal care networks have already intensified very significantly, family responsibilities. And depending on the type of households we live in, of course, we experience different patterns of intensification of domestic work and care. So the disclosure of schools means that the differences between those of with and without children are clearly heightened. And in general, those with caring responsibilities will experience a greater burden. So long-parent households are particularly exposed in this. And in general, household composition is very central. So we need to look at what the household leaves, what the household leaves, and who leaves like even household. So their age, the health status, the occupation they have, shape each of them has actually shaped the household's health and economic risk with implications for public health and the economy at the societal level. And of course, those who continue to work, the key workers are facing much bigger challenges in terms of health risk for both themselves and the people they live with. But also, there's a greater challenges in the provision of care for their families and in daily practices such as their ability to acquire food. So the conditions of key workers make it clearer than ever that we cannot understand what happens in employment as detached from social reproduction. The starting point is to, at the minimum, appreciate how these workers live in households that will shape their ability to go to work and their additional burdens in terms of care, domestic work, and also health risks. So in those countries where governments have put in place mechanisms to support, these tend to be for workers, while unpaid carers and unpaid care and domestic work in general falls outside of these decisions. And I think this is a key limitation that we need to focus on, and it is evident that both the disease itself and the government responses are deepening that process of privatization of social reproduction at the level of the household that I talked about at the beginning. Now, in terms of the organization of work, multiple forms of inequality interact to shape the differentiated impacts of the current crisis. So here I'm going to say a few words on the UK drawing on some data that I was able to put together, and then I'm going to say a few words about two categories of workers in the global south. So for the UK, the women's budget group has documented the 77% of healthcare workers are women, and the think tank autonomy has created a jobs index to assess which workers are more at risk in terms of exposure to the disease and physical proximity to others. And their findings show that the vast majority of high risk occupations are classified as key workers. Again, 77% of the high risk workforce are women, and 98% of high risk workers in low paid jobs are women, which I think is really staggering. And unfortunately, we don't have the same level of detail for bane workers and for migrant workers, but for example, the Institute of Race Relations reports that many migrant workers are essential workers, so they're continuing to work in this moment. And this needs to be highlighted how none of these workers would be eligible to remain in the UK under the new government's immigration policy to find those earning under £25,000 a year as low as low-skilled and essentially unwanted in the UK. So early figures from the UK, but also from the US, so show that the bane people are disproportionately affected by COVID-19, and of course, like this is an issue of racism and not of race. And the British Medical Association states that this could be the result of existing health and social inequalities in effective government and public health communication to bane communities, and also higher rates of underlying health conditions among some bane groups. So the crisis I think is really showing how the underpinning socioeconomic inequalities plays a specific social groups in a position of compounded risk to their occupational stages, the lack of safety at work, their living conditions and also their health. In the Global South, and again it would be very useful to have more data on workers in the Global South, but what we certainly know is that two groups of workers are going to face that are probably already facing a very tough reality. And these are the global supply chain workers and the informal workers. And at times, of course, a worker can be both an informal worker and a global supply chain worker. So we know that global supply chains have been severely disrupted. So UNCTED, for example, states that so far the pandemic had a cost of $50 billion in lost exports. And this was a few days ago, so this is going to be increasing by the day. And so I had a look at the government sector, for example, that is a sector where retailers are canceling orders and backing out of previously placed orders. And so this has meant incredible losses, estimated in the terms of $3 billion in terms of cancellations that have already taken place in Bangladesh, for example, which is, of course, a country that is a primary exporter of government. And so this means that workers in these factories, but also the home-based workers that contribute to the supply of garments have already lost their jobs or are losing their jobs and incomes. And we know from the research that has been conducted, for example, on the garment sector, supply chains that these workers at the bottom of global supply chains are often women. And the millions of informal workers who constitute 90% of all workers in the global south are both exposed to health risk and poverty. So some governments do not even recognize these workers as workers, but actually many of them are essential workers. So some of them are waste speakers, for example, and continue to work with not perfect. And so again, for the work that various people have been doing to shed light on the reality of the informal economy in the global south, and furthermore, I would recommend looking at the work by Vigo, for example. We know that women are overrepresented among the diverse types of informal jobs. And so I think this is something that we really need to pay attention to. So it is clear that the outcomes that we should expect, including those that we can already see are dire. And the profound class, gender and race inequalities that mark our socioeconomic systems are being exposed and aggravated and exacerbated before our eyes. I think we also need to pay attention to the many, if you want, indirect impacts that will also emerge. So we know, for example, that during the Ebola outbreak, resources for reproductive health were diverted to the emergency response. And this contributed to a rise in maternal mortality. So in the UK, already some weeks ago, the Guardian was reporting the shortage of twice as doubled, all into the diversion of staff to the COVID-19 response. So we need to keep an eye out for this. And of course, something that is incredibly worrying, although probably not surprising, is the surge in domestic violence that really shows how households can be places of harm for many. And this is something that needs to be borne in mind and something that requires action. I can see that now you can see on the screen a slide where you can see a list of resources, some of which I've mentioned in my talk so far. But of course, we need to think about all of these inequalities that I have been talking about. I think that there is an opportunity in the realization that something needs to change frankly. So we can no longer afford that to have societies organized on precarious labor, where families fall into the situation as soon as they're not able to work. Societies that are founded on the devaluation of essential work and on the prioritization of profit over life. So I'm going to conclude by mentioning four things that I think are done. And I think that the responses to the general principle is that this crisis is different from previous ones. And therefore, what is needed is also different. So it is clear that as much as households are central, I think they need to be supported for that, but they cannot and should not do everything. It should not take the burden of social reproduction highly. And so we need forms of community support, mutual aid groups and community organizing to share care and all forms of social reproduction to begin a process of socialization of social reproduction and care. I think we need a form of income guarantee or income replacement universal basic income for all including migrants and refugees. And we need this now. And we need to begin to work towards a system of universal basic services with a priority for universal care in those countries that don't have it yet. Then third, we need to permanently adopt the key worker or essential worker classification. And this is not only a language issue. I think these needs to entail better pay and better social status for all of these workers, including the workers in this category who are migrants. They need to be recognized indefinitely to remain. And fourth, I am very worried about the nationalist responses that we have seen so far. And I think we need an internationalist stance in order to contrast these nationalisms that are emerging in different places of the world. So we need activists in trade unions of feminist and environmental groups of farmers, organization and pro migration groups to come together to work towards the forms of international solidarity. So I think this is a time when feminist economists and political economists have valuable things to offer. And this is a serious responsibility that we should take up. So this is what I had to say. And I think I'm going to leave it there. And I look forward to listening to your questions and comments. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much, Sarah. Maybe while we give some time for people to put up their question, I do have one question. And I would like to come on the point where you mentioned something about rebranding like the UK government rebrand the workers and looking at low-skill and unskilled workers. Do you think that there should be a clear and perhaps internationally accepted definition of essential workers? Because right now we can see that different government actually define essential workers differently. In some countries, people who work in wet markets are deemed essentials and other don'ts. And domestic workers are essential in one country and not in another. So having a variation of definition may risk some group to fall into the cracks. Do you think that there should be an accepted definition of what essential is? Yes. Thank you so much for the question, Latifa. I think there will be differences across context. So we should not downplay those differences. But I think that some broad definition of what constitutes essential work is entirely possible. And it has to do with recognizing those forms of work that contribute towards social reproduction. And I think that in this sense, it has to do with care, of course. So we are looking at healthcare, education, and a number of social services. But also, I'm thinking a lot about the food chain workers and the people who work in transport, for example. And I think that it is entirely possible to come up with a definition of essential work that can be applied globally. And the primary aim is not necessarily to have some workers in some context, falling through the cracks, but to highlight the centrality of social reproduction in the world that we live in, essentially. And the one thing that these key workers and essential workers have in common is that they have been considered low skilled for a very long time up to very recently. And so we cannot afford to go back to a situation in which once the crisis is over, these workers will go back to be low skilled workers. I think we should abandon that unskilled, low skilled classification for good. Okay. Thank you, Sarah. We have one question from Isabel. I think this is in relation to the you mentioned about what countries could do. High level of debt that countries have right now is asking, how do you think that the universal services as a health care system and how sovereign debt is actually going to increase because of this crisis? So the question is about debt at the country level, not how so that necessarily. So sovereign debt, yeah, this is sovereign debt. Yes, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I think, look, like the type of measures that I talked about, like I wanted to highlight these measures, so because I think that this would be very unique in the current situation, given the fact that this crisis is different from others for the reasons that I described before. But of course, I think that we need to have a combination of responses. And so like, of course, sovereign debt is an important issue. And I think that the call for debt cancellation for countries in the global south is a very important one. And we will have a webinar with Cristina Lascarides on this topic. And of course, like these are measures that need to be put in place in order to create a space for particularly for the poorer countries to spend, like and to put in place resources and systems to take care of the populations, like and to reward and sustain social reproduction. Yes. The next questions that we have is from Sandra. She's asking about the Uniball Civil Basic Income. She's thinking of using some feminist debt scheme. The Uniball Civil Basic Income could trap women further into unpaid care roles and refuse on this. Thank you very much for the question, which I think is a very important one. So I I would not have advocated for a universal basic income up to recently, I think. And the reason is that I think that a system of universal basic services is probably more useful and appropriate to make sure that people have access to what they need, instead of assuming that by giving people money, they will be able to provide for their welfare, essentially. But I do think that in this context of crisis, universal basic income would be needed. And this is to make sure that families don't have to worry about having money to acquire food and so forth. But I don't think that a universal basic income has the potential to address gender inequality, per se. And for this, like I read recently, a very nice short article by my colleague and friend, Lorena Bambardotti, who listed those resources on that slide, which maybe we can put up again later, that makes this argument that the universal basic income might be needed in this situation of crisis, but it's not a fantasy or it's not perhaps an effective tool to address gender inequalities. And this is why I would stress that we need income replacement. We need perhaps a UBI like in some contexts, but it needs to be combined with a medium to longer term strategy on developing universal basic services. We have quite a few questions actually coming in. The next one, I think, is slightly interesting and controversial perhaps. It's asking which feminist perspectives has impact on economic decision making, whether there's an example of a country that has users feminist perspective in its policy, economic decision making? Thanks for the interesting question. Yes, so look, there are many different feminist economic perspectives. So we need to recognize this plurality. And as a matter of fact, in the past a few decades, there has been an uptake of the importance of gender and gender inequality in relation to the functioning of the economy that some governments have paid attention to and this is reflected in policies. So for example, I'm thinking about Canada, which is probably the latest country to adopt a type of international assistance policy explicitly defined as feminist. And I think that before Canada, Sweden had used a similar type of approach to essentially to aid and to development issues. What this means in practice and I had a student in the university where I was working previously who did his dissertation on this, it was very interesting. But for example, the Canada policy in this means essentially directing or channeling resources to types of development projects that target women have a gender component. And I think this is debatable whether we can achieve development goals, like poverty alleviation goals, like by targeting women. And I think many feminists, including myself, are quite doubtful that this is always the case. But I think what we need in terms of having governments that take a feminist economic perspective is particularly around valuing care work and all forms of social reproduction work that currently are devalued. And in some cases, they are not even considered to be work. And I think this is something that requires a lot of work on our side in order to get there. Thank you, Sarah. I'm going to address one question here and perhaps before doing that, this is one question from Ibrahim. He wanted you to explain a bit more on socialization of action. And that's another question from Graziella on intensification of working household and gender, given the different impact on COVID-19. More info on this from your side. She's requesting for that. But I just want to highlight to Graziella that through the end of this session, we'll put up again the sources of resources that Sarah has shared. So there will be a lot of information where you can go to find information, links to reports that will have a lot of information and data. So we'll put it up towards the end of this session for about five minutes so everybody can look at it. But if you want to answer those two, socialization of actions, more information on the household and the difficulty. Yeah, sure. So on socialization, I think this is something that is very important to me because I think that while on the one hand there is a pressure to say, well, you know, households and families like have a lot that they need to take on. And so like what we need to do is to support the households and families rather than big businesses. Which is of course, like I totally agree that this should happen. But I think what is very, very critical for me is to find that really households cannot take all of, they cannot take all of the responsibilities for care and social reproduction and they should not do that. So and I think, you know, the surge in domestic violence cases like highlights that households can be a site of harm for many people, like and for many vulnerable people, especially. So I think that we need to we need to think about ways in which care and social reproduction can be collectivized and socialized. And that means having a public provisioning of particular care services, for example. But also, I think it is fundamental to promote and to participate like in those grassroots like and community level organizing around, for example, food provisioning like and forms of care that entail the participation of community members and neighbors and so forth. Because I think like this is, this has got a very important transformative potential and it can act as an equalizer in really putting forward a more radical redistribution of care and social reproduction in society. So that is quite critical for me. And you're welcome, Ibrahim. And then in terms of intensification of domestic work at the level of the households, so I think we need to, so here like my reasoning was more like in terms of in conceptual terms, if you want like anecdotal like a piecing together information that I have been reading in newspapers and so forth. I think it is very clear that with the disease itself, we have an increase in care needs for the elderly and the sick, but also with the closure of schools, it is clear that people who are living at home with children have seen their responsibilities for childcare increase significantly over the past few weeks. And I think that this is an area on which we need to analyze further and actually we haven't seen data so far that captures like the extent to which this process of intensification has taken place. But it is very clear that it's taking place and like the people who are expected to continue to work from home like a while have to take care like of the children homeschooling and caring for them are of course, I mean this is you know like a rather impossible or very difficult like for many. So I think like this, sorry I also wanted to mention that something that is probably happening for some households and some families is that our changes in the distribution of the allocation of work and responsibilities within the household so there are those with the household dynamics that feminist economists have been looking at for a long time that also will need to be explored. So in a conversation I was having some time ago with my colleague so as Hannah Bargawi who's also feminist economist she was making an important point of thinking about how gender roles might change in the household and how like some men may take up more responsibilities so for unpaid care and domestic work in the context in which like the volume of that work has intensified. And I think this is possible like the key question is like to see like which households are affected in what ways and whether like some of these changes so where they where these changes have moved like I can say in a positive direction in terms of gender distribution of work whether these are sustainable or not like or whether these changes will be overturned like I want the crisis is over or not so yeah. The next excuse me the next question is from Gus. It's about the current neoliberal governments that we have and whether you know using universal basic income or universal basic services would further exacerbate you know the value or devalue the work of women in the global south. In the global south? Well because you put global south and north so globally yeah. Okay so whether universal basic income can devalue the work of women globally so I think I would probably go back to something that I said before like that I haven't been like a big a very big advocate of universal basic income but I think in the current crisis with like many people like losing their jobs losing their incomes and really facing conditions of poverty and destitution I think that governments need to do all they can in order to support people and avoid these negative consequences in terms of poverty and destitution so like we know like that even in the UK I think I was this week that three million people are facing issues of food insecurity because they cannot acquire food like so this is very serious so so like for me the universal basic income is I'm thinking of this in that in those terms but I do agree that the universal basic income per se does not address gender inequality and like it might have under certain circumstances the sort of negative implication of even exacerbating certain forms of gender inequality but I don't think like that what we need is a UBI universal basic income only I think that we need universal basic income and other forms of income replacement in combination with working towards developing universal basic services which is about ensuring that everybody has access to healthcare to education and to social services and basic infrastructure and I think that that system has the potential to address certain forms of gender inequality by alleviating the burden of care worker placed upon women essentially and redistributing it across the society I just want to pick up on that because I think Naila Kabir did mention about nationalizing basic services is this something that would you know you see would happen going forward given the lessons we learned from COVID-19? Yeah I agree with Naila that I think that nationalizations are certainly something that we need to think about and that I would like that to see happen and that was prior to this crisis and even more so so like as it happened with many other things I think this crisis is exposing a number of problems with the ways in which we organize our economies and societies that were already visible to some people before and now like they are made starkly visible to many more people and I think that the nationalization of certain services and certain industries would be desirable. This is one excuse me last I don't know whether this is sure any more questions okay that's one question from Sarah Newfer from your perspective how do you think progressive wealth taxes would be you know change inequalities in terms of class from feminist economists perspective? Yeah I think I think that a wealth tax like it would be highly appropriate and yeah I think as I said I think that we need to consider how different forms of inequality interact and articulate and I think that those forms of gender oppression and exploitation experienced by poorer women and poorer people are indeed very central and in general in order to give governments more resources to deal with the crisis and to think about the funding universal basic services and so forth I think that progressive wealth taxes like or even global wealth tax like would be highly appropriate. Okay let's see we have about four more minutes I think there's sufficient time for one or two more questions quick questions maybe just to give a bit of time for people to just get their thought I was just wondering in your views what do you think would be the role of the private sector in softening the economic impact of what the recession that we're going to see especially for informal workers and you know a vulnerable group or vulnerable women what do you think the private sector can actually do? Yeah thanks so I think I think we need to see like where the private sector is like you know at the other end of these crises essentially so in a way I think that let's say I would worry that if we want to if we expect the private sector to take up a very large role I would worry that now what governments are doing would be directed more towards the private sector and less so towards the people essentially and I don't think that that is so desirable so and what we have seen in these crises is really how much the public sector can do and how much governments can do so I think that at the moment I would focus more on that rather than thinking about what the private sector can do later on maybe for informal workers in the global south well in some countries like I can see like that so like the one the one big thing that many so workers organizations and so forth are calling for our emergency cash grant and and I think that that is what we need to focus on at the moment okay um okay that's one that just came in um whether your parental leave's opportunity leave could help channeling a cultural and economic change towards evaluating or evaluating care yes I think parental leave policies are incredibly important but then again I can so thinking about the variety of workers and livelihoods from a global perspective like we need to see like whether these parental leave policies for example could be applied somehow to informal workers so which at the moment is not really a possibility for us and so you know of course like let's work on this absolutely but let's also remember like what we need to put in place for those workers that are not covered by provisions such as parental leave I think that was the last of our question and yeah okay one minute left I would like to well okay that's one question I think I don't I leave it to you Sarah if you want to answer this um if you we have seen more authoritarian government like China that has been more successful in containing the issue rather than countries in the west do you anticipate a shift towards authoritarian form of government I think I'll take this as a final question yes respond to this yes it's a big question and I'm not an expert like on on authoritarianism but like I can just share like a very quick thought which is that yes I think this is a risk and it is something that we need to keep our eyes on but in a way though like I think that the power of the state to address the current need I mean both crises health and economic crisis say is very important so like in a way it's a delicate balance that we need to strike but this is also why I think that those forms of community and grassroots level organizers are so important because I would not simply say that you know or simply expect so that governments and states should do everything I think like we need to take up some issues in our hands thank you so much um Sarah for clearing stimulating um discussions that we have this afternoon and we hope that this webinar has been useful um to all of you and just for everybody's information this will be up on open economic forum facebook um as well as so as economics podcast so um we'll have another session next week on um COVID-19 and economic development in America in Latin America so don't forget to join us and I am going to put up um the slides to share resources for information just for one minute so everybody can see it but with that I think um that's it and thank you everyone for your time and joining us today thank you so much Latifa great moderation and thanks so much to all of you for having joined us we have like a fantastic lineup of webinars coming up so we'll check like the new talks that are coming up in the next weeks okay all right thank you everyone thank you