Half the Sky

by Nicholas D. Kristof

a police station and stepped inside. The police first tried to shoo them away, then arrested the girls for illegal immigration. Rath served a year in prison under Malaysia’s tough anti-immigrant laws, and then she was supposed to be repatriated. She thought a Malaysian policeman was escorting her home when he drove her to the Thai border—but then he sold her to a trafficker, who peddled her to a Thai brothel.

In the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, five thousand women and girls have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members or in-laws—or, perhaps worse, been seared with acid—for perceived disobedience just in the last nine years.

In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or

unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal.

In Fujian Province, China, a peasant raved to us about ultrasound: “We don’t have to have daughters anymore!”

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.

world. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls. Partly as a result of that research, Goldman Sachs committed $100 million to a “10,000 Women” campaign meant to give that many women a business education.

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.

Our own estimate is that there are 3 million women and girls (and a very small number of boys) worldwide who can be fairly termed enslaved in the sex trade.

deception) across an international border. The U.S. State Department has estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, 80 percent of them women and girls,

In contrast, in the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1780s, an average of just under eighty thousand slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. The average then dropped to a bit more than fifty thousand between 1811 and 1850. In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into

slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—although the overall population

As the journal Foreign Affairs observed: “Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave tra...

Contradicting the notion that the girls get a decent income, Geeta was never paid a single rupee for her work. It was slave labor, performed under threat of execution. Other women who

worked in Sonagachi after DMSC took control offered similar stories.

A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them

up and throwing them back into the water. “What are you doing, son?” the man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.” The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. “It sure made a difference to that one,” he said.

But when a woman does stand up, it’s imperative that outsiders champion her; we also must nurture institutions to protect such people.

Mukhtar welcomes volunteers to teach English in her schools and will give them free room and board as long as they commit to staying a few months. We can’t imagine a richer learning experience. Mukhtar also started her own

If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” then the girl’s father and mother … shall display the cloth [that the couple slept on] before the elders of the town…. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her

father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. —DEUTERONOMY 22:13-21

The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world (Pakistan’s government uncovered 1,261 honor killings in 2003 alone). But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides. Our estimate is that at least 6,000, and probably far more, honor killings take place annually around the world.

All the local residents knew that there were soldiers from the Hutu Interahamwe militia in the area, so Dina was fearful whenever she went out to farm the crops. But the alternative was to starve. One day, because of the danger, Dina cut short her work in her bean field and headed back to town well before sunset. As she was walking home, five Hutu militia members surrounded her. They had guns and knives and forced her to the ground. One of them was carrying a stick.

John Holmes, the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, says flatly: “The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world.”

“People said it was a curse,” Mahabouba recalled. “They said, ‘If you’re cursed, you shouldn’t stay here. You should leave.’” Mahabouba’s uncle wanted to help the girl, but his wife feared that helping someone cursed by God would be sacrilegious. She urged her husband to take Mahabouba outside the village and leave the

gynecoid, android, anthropoid, and platypelloid.

In any case, the most common pelvis for women is gynecoid, which is most accommodating of the birth process (but is not found on great women runners) and is particularly common among Caucasian women. In contrast, the anthropoid pelvis is elongated, permits fast running, and is more likely to result in obstructed labor. Data on pelvis shapes is poor, but African women seem disproportionately likely to have

The World Bank has estimated that for every one thousand girls who get one additional year of education, two fewer women will die in childbirth.

So let’s not overstate the case. Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women.

“I was not consulted,” Edna says. “I was caught, held down, and it was done. My mother thought it was the right thing to do. My father was out of town. When he came back and heard, that was the only time I ever saw him with tears in his eyes. And that encouraged me, because if he thought it was wrong, then that meant a lot.”

Another time, a nomadic woman gave birth in the desert and developed a fistula. Her husband couldn’t stand her smell and constant wetness, and stabbed her in the throat; the knife went through her tongue and stopped at her palate. The other nomads stitched her throat together with needle and thread and carried her to Edna’s hospital.

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only

only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither.

George W. Bush sponsored his presidential initiative to fight AIDS—the best single thing he ever did, arguably saving more than 9 million lives.

The Index of Global Philanthropy calculates that U.S. religious organizations give $5.4 billion annually to developing countries, more than twice as much as is given by U.S. foundations.

We need funding for Teach the World, an international version of Teach For America, to send young people abroad for a year, a term that would then be renewable.

Conservative Muslims often side with the top religious authority in Saudi Arabia, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz, who declared in 2004: “Allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe.”

Yet over the centuries Christianity has mostly moved beyond that. In contrast, conservative Islam has barely budged. It is still frozen in the world view of seventh-century Arabia, amid attitudes that were progressive for the time but are a millennium out of date. When a girls’ junior high school caught fire in Saudi Arabia in 2002, the religious police allegedly forced teenage girls back into the burning building rather than allow them to escape without head coverings and long black cloaks. Fourteen girls were reportedly burned to death.

A useful analogy is slavery. Islam improved the position of slaves compared to their status in pre-Islamic societies, and the Koran encourages the freeing of slaves as a meritorious act. At the same time, Muhammad himself had many slaves, and Islamic law unmistakably accepts slavery. Indeed, Saudi Arabia abolished slavery only in 1962, and Mauritania in 1981.

them. A ninth-century scholar, Al-Tirmidhi, recounted that houri are gorgeous young women with white skin, who never menstruate, urinate, or defecate. He added that they have “large breasts” that are “not inclined to dangle.”

poor. The inability of a young man to settle down in a family may increase the likelihood of his drifting toward violence.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. —DEREK BOK

fetuses. A study in Ecuador suggests that iodine deficiency typically shaves ten to fifteen points off a child’s IQ. Worldwide, iodine deficiency alone reduces humanity’s collective IQ by more than 1 billion points. According to one estimate, just $19 million would pay for salt iodization in poor countries that need it. This would yield economic benefits that another study found were nine times the cost. The result is that while salt iodization

The local women’s variety of cassava produced 800 kilos per hectare, and so we introduced a variety that got three tons per hectare. The result was a terrific harvest. But then we ran into a problem. Cassava was women’s work, so the men wouldn’t help them harvest it. The women didn’t have time to harvest such huge yields, and there wasn’t a capacity to process that much cassava.

So we introduced processing equipment. Unfortunately, this variety of cassava that we had introduced had great yields, but it also was more bitter and toxic. Cassava always produces a little bit of a cyanide-related compound, but this variety produced larger amounts than normal. So the runoff after processing had more cyanide, and we had to introduce systems to avoid contaminating ground water with cyanide—that would have been a catastrophe. So we dealt with that, and finally the project looked very successful. The women were making a lot of money on their cassava. We were delighted. But because the women were making so much, the men came in and kicked the women out of the cassava fields. The tradition was that women

raise staple crops, and men raise cash crops. And the men reasoned that if cassava was so profitable, it must now be a man’s crop. And so the men took over cassava, and they used the profits for beer...

Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish. Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot.

Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of twenty-five, who guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make their payments and discuss a social issue.

One response is China. A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. Foot-binding, child marriage, concubinage, and female infanticide were embedded in traditional Chinese culture. Rural Chinese girls in the early twentieth century sometimes didn’t even get real names,