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six of the ten richest self-made women in the world are now Chinese.
Communism after the 1949 revolution was brutal in China, leading to tens of millions of deaths by famine or repression, but its single most positive legacy was the emancipation of women. After taking power, Mao brought women into the workforce and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and he used his political capital to abolish child marriage, prostitution, and concubinage. It was Mao who proclaimed: “Women hold up half the sky.”
Educating and empowering girls is certainly the right thing to do, but, most important in the eyes of many families, it is profitable! China has enjoyed a virtuous circle in which, once girls had economic value, parents invested more in them and gave them greater autonomy.
Charity Navigator,
sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women’s issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed.
Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, calculate that for sixty years Britain sacrificed an annual average of 1.8 percentage points of its GNP because of its moral commitment to ending slavery. That is an astonishing total, cumulatively amounting to more than an entire year’s GNP for Great Britain (for the United States today, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing more than $14 trillion), a significant and sustained sacrifice in the British standard of living. It was a heroic example of a nation placing its values above its interests.
“Encouraging more women into the labor force has been the single biggest driver of Euro-zone’s labor market success, much more so than ‘conventional’ labor market reforms,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a research report in 2007. Likewise, public companies that have more women executives consistently perform better than those with fewer women. One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies found that the one quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35 percent higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest
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While women still lag in political, corporate, and government positions, they dominate the civil sector in much of the world.
Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.
“introducing cable television is equivalent to roughly five years of female education,”
“Self-improvement comes mainly from trying to help others.”
Yet Professor Haidt and others advise that there are a few factors that can affect our happiness levels in a sustained way. One is “a connection to something larger”—a greater cause or a humanitarian purpose. Traditionally, this was what brought people to churches or other religious institutions, but any movement or humanitarian initiative can provide a sense of purpose that boosts one’s happiness quotient. We are neurologically constructed so that we gain huge personal dividends from altruism.
Go to www.globalgiving.org or www.kiva.org and open an account. Both sites are people-to-people (P2P),
Sign up for e-mail updates on www.womensenews.org
a similar service, www.worldpulse.com.
Join the CARE Action Network at www.can.care.org.
Two useful Web sites to consult for more information about aid groups are www.charitynavigator.org and www.givewell.net.
Girls Helping Girls, www.empoweragirl.org,
