Half the Sky

by Nicholas D. Kristof

Back then, the oppression of women was a fringe issue, the kind of worthy cause the Girl Scouts might raise money for.

This study found that thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive—and that is just in the first year of life.

In India, a “bride burning”—to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry—takes place approximately once every two hours, but these rarely constitute news.

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.

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

China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), India has 108, and Pakistan has 111.

“missing women” of between 60 million and 101 million. Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.

girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age.

A son is an indispensable treasure, while a wife is replaceable. He had purchased medication for the boy alone. “She’s always sick,” he gruffly said of his wife, “so it’s not worth buying medicine for her.”

Since the 1990s, the spread of ultrasound machines has allowed pregnant women to find out the sex of their fetuses—and then get abortions if they are female.

To prevent sex-selective abortion, China and India now bar doctors and ultrasound technicians from telling a pregnant woman the sex of her fetus.

On average, the deaths of fifteen infant girls can be avoided by allowing one hundred female fetuses to be selectively aborted.

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.

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 Self Employed Women’s Association was founded in India in 1972 and ever since has supported the poorest women in starting businesses—raising living standards in ways that have dazzled scholars and foundations.

In the 1990s, the American left and right collaborated and achieved the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which was a milestone in raising awareness of international trafficking on the global agenda.

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.

21 percent of Ghanaian women reported in one survey that their sexual initiation was by rape; 17 percent of Nigerian women said that they had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen; and 21 percent of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen.

One impediment for women planning to run for political office in Kenya is the cost of round-the-clock security. That protection is needed to prevent political enemies from having them raped; gangsters calculate that female candidates can be uniquely humiliated and discredited that way.

Indeed, at the time of Woineshet’s rape, Ethiopian law explicitly provided that a man could not be prosecuted for violating a woman or girl he later married.

One might have understood cutting funds to the China program, but slashing funds for the consortium in Africa was abhorrent.

This incident reflects the “God Gulf” in American foreign policy. Religion plays a particularly profound role in shaping policies on population and family planning, and secular liberals and conservative Christians regularly square off.

“contrary to its stated intentions, the global gag rule results in more unwanted pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, and more deaths of women and girls.”

“We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People’s Republic of China.” In the thirty-two counties in China where UNFPA operates pilot programs, it has reduced abortion rates by 40 percent, to a rate lower than that in the United States.

That was a huge advance for the 60 million Chinese women with IUDs, and it averted about 500,000 abortions every year. In short, since then, UNFPA has prevented nearly 10 million abortions in China. That’s a record far better than that of any pro-life organization.

Perhaps the most effective way to encourage smaller families is to promote education, particularly for girls. For example, England slowed its fertility rate seriously in the 1870s, probably because of the Education Act of 1870, which called for compulsory education.

One way to curb fertility, therefore, may be to give women more say-so in the family.

Women are about twice as likely to be infected during heterosexual sex with an HIV-positive partner as men are.

A University of California study suggested that the cost of a year of life saved through a condom distribution program was $3.50, versus $1,033 in an AIDS treatment program (admittedly, that was when AIDS medications were more expensive). Another study found that each $1 million spent on condoms saved $466 million in AIDS-related costs.

The Bush administration focused its AIDS prevention campaign on abstinence-only programs.

“She doesn’t love me!” Thabang replied fiercely, tears trickling down her cheeks as she stood outside her home fifteen feet away from her mother, who was also crying. “If she did, she would talk to me instead of beating me. She wouldn’t say these things about me. She would accept my friends.”

And these prevention methods are much cheaper than treating an AIDS patient for years.

The warning didn’t reduce girls’ sexual activity, but they did end up sleeping with boyfriends their own age rather than with older men.

Pentecostal churches typically encourage all members of the congregation to speak up and preach during the service.

Arthur Brooks, an economist, has found that the one third of Americans who attend worship services at least once a week are “inarguably more charitable in every measurable way” than the two thirds who are less religious.

It would also be useful if there were better mechanisms for people to donate time. The Peace Corps is a valuable program, but it requires an intimidating commitment of twenty-seven months, and the schedule does not follow the academic year to accommodate those who are trying to delay graduate school.

For all these diverse problems, empowering women is part of the answer. Most obviously, educating girls and bringing them into the formal economy will yield economic dividends and help address global poverty.

In Kyrgyzstan, women don’t hold a single seat in parliament but run 90 percent of the NGOs.