Philanthropist Melinda French Gates and Nobel Prize economist Esther Duflo talk with host Reena Ninan about the best ways to empower women economically post-COVID-19 on the premiere episode of the Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women’s (HERO) second season. French Gates is the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports this podcast. French Gates is also the founder of Pivotal Ventures and author of The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World about her work on gender equality. Duflo is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and won the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 2019 for her experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Duflo is the author of Good Economics for Hard Times and Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.

This season on HERO, we will delve deeper into all the obstacles blocking women from their full financial potential and interview women breaking these barriers down. Listeners will hear from people reforming marital laws in South Africa and property rights in Kenya—and what victories in both places would mean for unlocking women’s financial potential. We will also look at which micro-finance strategies work best and why better lending practices could be huge for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women is a Foreign Policy podcast made possible through funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Special thanks this week to all the people who helped make this conversation with Melinda French Gates and Esther Duflo possible, including Amy Jerrett, Laura Dickinson, Bo Jungmayer, Sam Veatch, Lynne Thompson, Heather McCurdy, and Rimjhim Dey. And thank you to Ketki Gujjar and Miraiben Chatterjee, who helped connect us to Sheela from SEWA, and Manveena Suri and Shreya Adhikari for Sheela’s voiceover. 

Here are links to research cited in today’s episode:

- The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law Project’s most recent 2022 report provided the data behind the numbers we cite at the beginning of the episode: specifically, that women have three-quarters of the rights men have and the fact that women still do not have the same rights as men to inherit property in 75 countries.

- The study Melinda French Gates cites toward the beginning of the interview is from the research group ORB International.

Finally, if you like HERO, check out Reena Ninan's other great show, Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting. It's on all the platforms! https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/614c9797ad0d6f00132e0faf

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