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 covid.

Far fewer women work in science despite girls outpacing boys in school.

Women are needed like never before.

As the Covid death toll continues to rise well, the crisis has wrecked 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 covid 19 uh, the you for me for me, because the administration is, uh, um, held in Iran.

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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 of 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 Katzenberger, it has become a routine.

She is one of the many female nurses who have been pushing their limits day and night for a year now taking care of coronavirus 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.

Okay, Stressful is also harder to Herman 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 falls mainly on women to stem the Kinsey, your mom a secret.

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.

Yeah, more than 90% of the people fighting the daily battles on the nursing front are women, and they turn up to 10% less than their male counterparts, according to the German Federation of Trade Unions.

The chances of promotion as slim and they often work nights data.

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 stopped 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 Catalan Burger knows that to 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 and dumped in permanent and probably 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.

Yeah, I spoke to to Tenders Enyimba, 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 hurt?

Yes, a matter of life and death in that, uh, not only does Covid 19 affect people from the racial standpoint, but also from the gender standpoint.

And there is research that shows that COVID 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 work on not only beating this crisis but also equality within the business.

I'll give my example, uh, for with my collaborators have worked with John Francois and obviously venue on a paper regarding the social effects of Covid 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 covid 19, particularly on women in business, uh, and and and their careers.

And this actually helps out also to take out the emotional term world 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 are actually doing the work related to combating sexism.

But then science and in the academic field overall, what else did you find in your work in how covid 19 is affecting the economy and female entrepreneurs in Ghana, we found that, uh, covid 19.

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 due to the pandemic have to stay at home and take care of their Children, their sales for the 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 health effects.

There's also the social effect that may necessarily disadvantaged female entrepreneurs compared to male entrepreneurs.

This is not only particular in the gang a case or two entrepreneurship.

This also translates to just women who are working from home and whose careers have been affected by the pandemic.

So a tender.

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, a situation If you can always find people champion your success, find mentors who want you to do well working labs with people who 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 to attend to its Enyimba.

Thank you very much for being on the show today.

Thank you very much over now to our science correspondent Derrick 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 coronavirus myth after another, so it's no wonder that vaccines have spawned 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.

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 the 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 and 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 different proteins from them, and possibly a whole lot more so.

Of course, there can be structural molecular overlap 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.