Kathy Calvin, president and chief executive officer of the United Nations Foundation, sat down with HuffPost Live at Davos on Wednesday to discuss how giving women the same opportunities as men can help the global community.
“If women have the choice when and how often to have babies, their community and their own personal lives are improved,” she said. “If girls are allowed to stay in school just two more years, it has an impact on the GDP of their country.”
Calvin said one major problem is that some women in developing countries don’t even receive proper documentation when they’re born, making it hard to track their progress later in life.
“One of the biggest problems we have is that data is unavailable. We simply don’t know how many girls are born and when because they don’t get birth certificates,” Calvin said. “So that makes it pretty hard to say when they should get married or when they shouldn’t. They don’t have the right to land because they don’t have a birth certificate. So there’s a whole set of issues from financial inclusion to sexual violence to the right to work that have to do with what we understand about women today.”
Below, more updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:
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“Women have natural curiosities, as do men, and we just want to show women they can pursue these fields and they can be feminine, they can be mothers, they can be wives, they really can do all those things and do it on their own terms,” Doudna added.
“I feel that the opportunities for really bringing together different fields has never been better,” Doudna said, noting she’s worked with a lot of artists to create works that describe sciences in a way that non-scientists can look at and understand.
Doudna emphasized the “critical” importance of integrating science, technology and eduction with art, “because they all really go together.”
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“What I also think is important is that transparency include real access and ability to influence,” she said.
Al Jazeera America Host Ali Velshi talks about how the business community can address the impacts of climate change.
Espinel addressed government’s approach to technology.
“I think for governments anytime you’re responding to a new situation I think governments… there are a lot of different concerns that you’re trying to weigh,” Espinel said.
“The software industry feels generally that governments have been overly slow to respond to some of these,” she added.
Espinel said a lot of fear of technology is driven by lack of understanding.
“It’s clear we’re in a huge wave of innovation,” Espinel said.
Espinel said there’s concern about what will happen with jobs as technology continues to develop. While she said technology could affect some existing jobs, there are huge advantages that could be gained in the developing world.
