Lady Business: Women’s health, and what it means to be "safe" in Mexico

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 145th issue, published March 19, 2023.
 

Health and Safety

Hi, and happy almost-spring! Welcome to all of my new subscribers, and thank you for joining this sporadic newsletter. (If you signed up in the past couple of weeks, would you mind hitting reply and letting me know how you found Lady Business?) 

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been diving into a reporting project that is getting ready to hit daylight. A couple of related pieces have already been published at Fortune, where my colleague Erika Fry and I were awarded a grant by the NIHCM Foundation for a series of articles on how the business of science and medicine left women behind. I’ll have more to say about this series soon, but here’s what I’ve published so far:

–"Why is women’s health so underresearched, underfunded, and underserved?"

–"American women still can’t get birth control pills without a prescription. This company has been trying for nine years to change that."

Meanwhile, I recently spent a long weekend in Mexico, which included my first visit to the southwestern city of Oaxaca. It was beautiful, warm, full of interesting food and delicious things to drink (and sometimes both at once, as I discovered when I ordered a tomato margarita at one rooftop bar and received a cocktail with an entire goat-cheese-cherry-tomato tostada balanced on top). But there was also a ton of this sobering graffiti around town:
 

Mariela Saidí was a 27-year-old biologist and YouTuber who was murdered almost four years ago. Her boyfriend, apparently the son of a well-connected local official, was eventually arrested for her death, though as of February the case was apparently still pending.

I say "apparently," because I’m partially relying on dubious details provided by Google translate. There’s almost no English-language coverage of Saidí’s murder or her alleged killer’s trial, despite her name being graffitied all over central Oaxaca–where more than 1 million tourists visit every year.

You know what there is coverage of?

This isn’t to minimize the two deaths, or very frightening kidnapping, of four Americans who drove over the border recently. But as many of these articles point out, tourists generally aren’t the people in Mexico in danger: "An overwhelming majority of visitors enjoy a safe vacation in Mexico, and tourists are largely sheltered from the violence that grips local communities."

That violence falls heavily on Mexican women: An average of 10 women and girls are killed every day in the country. The government has recognized that "femicide"–killing women because of their gender–has been "a major problem for decades," the AP reported in December, "yet little progress is evident in national data."
 
The state of Oaxaca is leading these awful statistics, with almost 30 known femicides so far this year and more than 538 violent deaths of women since August 2018. Some of those murders have received more English-language press coverage than Mariela Saidí’s–if you can find them buried under all the warnings about American spring break plans. But there’s so much more that could be written about the real health and safety risks of being in Mexico–especially for the women and girls who live there. 
 

Lady Bits

–Silicon Valley Bank’s longtime CEO made some terrible investment decisions, spent a lot of money on parties and poker games, and spent most of last year without a chief risk officer, but … sure, let’s blame this bank’s meltdown on its board’s relative diversity.

–Speaking of financial crises, I wrote for Fortune about the Biden administration nominating former Mastercard chief executive Ajay Banga to lead the World Bank, and what it signals about the post-2008 reputation of Wall Street CEOs. 

–I want to be excited about new Ted Lasso, finally. But one week in and boy, am I already bored with the ongoing trauma plots. 

Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com