The Pandemicene Podcast aims to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – imagine and enact just futures both in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide.
Welcome to the Pandemicene Podcast. In today’s episode, Sophia Parizadeh explores how COVID-19 has opened old wounds on a global scale. In terms of gender inequality, the pandemic has had especially regressive effects. Studies show that women are far more vulnerable than men to the detrimental economic and social effects of COVID-19. In honor of Women’s History Month in March, Sophia conversed with four women around the U.S. from different ethnic backgrounds, discussing the ways in which gender and race intersect in their personal and professional lives and shape their experiences with the pandemic.
Interviewer Bio:
Sophia Parizadeh is a College Ten affiliate, first-year undergraduate student majoring in Politics. She is interested in understanding systemic racial inequality and how it has been magnified within the pandemic. She hopes to shed light on other social justice issues and work towards forming solutions to today’s problems.
Guest Bios:
Aissata Ba is a Black Muslim woman, first-year college student at UC Santa Cruz, and a social media influencer. Her YouTube channel, with links to other platforms, can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/AChapterFromAisha/about.
Ekta Menghani is a receptionist at Saddleback Hospital in Orange County, California. She loves working with the diverse women of color who come to her clinic for care. She is also a mother who has supported her children adapting to attend school remotely this past year.
Dr. Taraneh Sarlati is a physician at Kaiser in Riverside, California, who has been working with COVID patients since the beginning of this pandemic.
Dr. Paria Sadat Musavi Gharavi is a postdoctoral researcher and a materials scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, for which she moved from Australia to Philadelphia at the beginning of the pandemic.