Half the Sky

by Nicholas D. Kristof

When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day—such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls.

Less than 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid is specifically targeted to women and girls.

It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.

Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.

Eighty percent of the employees on the assembly lines in coastal China are female, and the proportion across the manufacturing belt of East Asia is at least 70 percent. The economic explosion in Asia was, in large part, an outgrowth of the economic empowerment of women. “They have smaller fingers, so they’re better at stitching,” the manager of a purse factory explained to us. “They’re obedient and work harder than men,” said the head of a toy factory. “And we can pay them less.”

“Women’s empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.”

Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries.

Honor killings, sexual slavery, and genital cutting may seem to Western readers to be tragic but inevitable in a world far, far away. In much the same way, slavery was once widely viewed by many decent Europeans and Americans as a regrettable but ineluctable feature of human life.

Her distinguishing characteristic is obstinacy. She can be dogged and mulish, and that is one reason the villagers find her so unpleasant. She breaches the pattern of femininity in rural India by talking back—and fighting back.

The term that is usually used for this phenomenon, “sex trafficking,” is a misnomer. The problem isn’t sex, nor is it prostitution as such.

Numbers are difficult to calculate in part because sex workers can’t be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily. Some commentators look at prostitutes and see only sex slaves; others see only entrepreneurs.

And that is something you see routinely: Aid projects have a mixed record in helping people abroad, but a superb record in inspiring and educating the donors.

People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans.

The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking. That must be the starting point of any abolitionist movement.

In contrast, there’s empirical evidence that crackdowns can succeed, when combined with social services such as job retraining and drug rehabilitation, and that’s the approach we’ve come to favor. In countries with widespread trafficking, we favor a law enforcement strategy that pushes for fundamental change in police attitudes and regular police inspections to check for underage girls or anyone being held against their will. That means holding governments accountable not just to pass laws but also to enforce them, and monitoring how many brothels are raided and pimps are arrested. Jail-like brothels should be closed down, sting operations should be mounted against buyers of virgin girls, and national police chiefs must be under pressure to crack down on corruption as it relates to trafficking. The idea is to reduce the brothel owners’ profits.

In poor countries, the law is often irrelevant, particularly outside the capital. Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.

Of course, this is a delicate matter, and it’s dangerous for foreign cheerleaders to urge local girls to assume undue risks. But it’s also essential to help young women find their voices. Education and empowerment training can show girls that femininity does not entail docility, and can nurture assertiveness so that girls and women stand up for themselves.

“Empowerment” is a cliché in the aid community, but it is truly what is needed. The first step toward greater justice is to transform that culture of female docility and subservience, so that women themselves become more assertive and demanding. As we said earlier, that is, of course, easy for outsiders like us to say: We’re not the ones who run horrible risks for speaking up. But when a woman does stand up, it’s imperative that outsiders champion her; we also must nurture institutions to protect such people. Sometimes we may even need to provide asylum for those whose lives are in danger. More broadly, the single most important way to encourage women and girls to stand up for their rights is education, and we can do far more to promote universal education in poor countries.

The big donors, whether government aid groups or large philanthropic organizations, want to make systematic interventions that are scalable, and there are good reasons for that. But as a result they miss opportunities to bring about social change by failing to set up networks to identify and support individual leaders who can make a difference in the trenches.

They can be difficult, seemingly unreasonable people, but these very qualities are sometimes precisely what allow them to succeed.

Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.

We sometimes think that Westerners invest too much effort in changing unjust laws and not enough in changing culture, by building schools or assisting grassroots movements. Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn’t the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

These attitudes are embedded in culture and will change only with education and local leadership. But outsiders have their supporting role to play, too, in part by shining a spotlight on these regressive attitudes in an effort to break the taboo that often surrounds them.

In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking.

The most effective change agents aren’t foreigners but local women (and sometimes men) who galvanize a movement—

Mass rape is as effective as slaughtering people, yet it doesn’t leave corpses that lead to human rights prosecutions. And rape tends to undermine the victim groups’ tribal structures, because leaders lose authority when they can’t protect the women. In short, rape becomes a tool of war in conservative societies precisely because female sexuality is so sacred.

The first step to saving mothers’ lives is to understand the reasons for maternal mortality. The immediate cause of death may be eclampsia, hemorrhage, malaria, abortion complications, obstructed labor or sepsis. But behind the medical explanations are the sociological and biological ones.

During World War I, more American women died in childbirth than American men died in war.

The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband’s testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden.

Sri Lanka shows what it takes to reduce maternal mortality. Family planning and delayed marriage help, and so do mosquito nets. A functioning health care system in rural areas is also essential.

One of the scandals of the early twenty-first century is that 122 million women around the world want contraception and can’t get it. Whatever one thinks of abortion, it’s tragic that up to 40 percent of all pregnancies globally are unplanned or unwanted—and that almost half of those result in induced abortions. By some measures, more than one quarter of all maternal deaths could be avoided if there were no unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

It appears that the most effective contraceptive is education for girls, although birth control supplies are obviously needed as well.

If there is to be a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries, it will have to bridge the God Gulf. Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause. That’s what happened two centuries ago in the abolitionist movement, when liberal deists and conservative evangelicals joined forces to overthrow slavery. And it’s the only way to muster the political will to get now-invisible women onto the international agenda.

“Look, when we’re among ourselves, of course we complain about the rules,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that we can’t drive. But these are our problems, not yours. We don’t want anybody fighting for us—and we certainly don’t want anybody feeling sorry for us.”

Some evidence suggests that where families repress women, governments end up repressing all citizens.

American organizations would have accomplished much more if they had financed and supported Sakena, rather than dispatching their own representatives to Kabul. That’s generally true: The best role for Americans who want to help Muslim women isn’t holding the microphone at the front of the rally but writing the checks and carrying the bags in the back.

While empowering women is critical to overcoming poverty, it represents a field of aid work that is particularly challenging in that it involves tinkering with the culture, religion, and family relations of a society that we often don’t fully understand.

Another reason for making women and girls the focus of antipoverty programs has to do with an impolitic secret of global poverty: Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending—by men.

One early pair of studies found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine, and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

As Professor Miller notes, opponents of women’s political participation have often made the argument that if women get involved in outside activities, then children will suffer. In fact, the evidence from our own history is that women’s political participation has proved to be of vast, life-saving benefit to America’s children.

It was Mao who proclaimed: “Women hold up half the sky.”

Americans mostly hear about the iniquities of garment factories, and they are real—the forced overtime, the sexual harassment, the dangerous conditions. Yet women and girls still stream to such factories because they’re preferable to the alternative of hoeing fields all day back in a village.

The common thread is that they are grassroots projects with local ownership, sometimes resembling social or religious movements more than traditional aid projects.

It’s fine to hold UN conferences on education, but sometimes it does more good to allocate the money to projects on the ground.