Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof

  Youth bulges may well be particularly destabilizing in conservative Muslim countries, because women are largely passive and silent—amplifying the impact of young men. Moreover, in other parts of the world, young men aged fifteen through twenty-four spend many of their waking moments chasing young women. In contrast, in conservative Muslim countries, some young men make war, not love.

  In strict Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, many young men have little hope of ever finding a partner. Typically in such nations, there are at least 3 percent more males than females, partly because females don’t receive the same medical care as males. Also, polygamy means that the wealthiest men take two or three wives, leaving even fewer women available for the poor. The inability of a young man to settle down in a family may increase the likelihood of his drifting toward violence.

  Young men in such countries grow up in an all-male environment, in a testosterone-saturated world that has the ethos of a high school boys’ locker room. Organizations made up disproportionately of young men—whether they be gangs or boys’ schools or prisons or military units—are often particularly violent. We suspect that the same can be true of entire countries.

  Countries that repress women also tend to be backward economically, adding to the frustrations that nurture terrorism. Farsighted Muslim leaders worry that gender inequality blocks them from tapping their nations’ greatest unexploited economic resource—the half of the population that is female. In Yemen, women make up only 6 percent of the nonagricultural labor force; the figure is 9 percent in Pakistan. Contrast that with between 40 percent and 50 percent in countries such as China and the United States. As a UN Arab Human Development Report put it: “The rise of women is in fact a prerequisite for an Arab renaissance.”

  Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, during the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the top ten countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” said Gates, “you’re not going to get too close to the top ten.” The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering, while the larger audience on the left applauded tepidly.

  Some evidence suggests that where families repress women, governments end up repressing all citizens. “The status of women, more than other factors that predominate in Western thinking about religious systems and politics, links Islam and the democracy deficit,” writes the scholar M. Steven Fish. That may be because an authoritarian and patriarchal home environment is mirrored in an authoritarian and patriarchal political system.

  The consequences of repressing women may run even deeper. David Landes, the eminent Harvard historian, in his magisterial book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, explores why it was Europe that nurtured an industrial revolution, and not Asia or the Middle East. He argues that one of the key forces working in Europe’s favor was openness to new ideas, and that one of the best gauges of that openness was how a country treated its women:

  The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment. One cannot call male children “Pasha,” or, as in Iran, tell them that they have a golden penis,* without reducing their need to learn and do….

  In general, the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity.

  The Afghan Insurgent

  The best-known aid effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the school-building project of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber who came down half dead from a failed attempt to climb the second-highest peak in the world, K2. Himalayan villagers revived Greg and shared what little they had with him. When he recovered, he found that the village had seventy-eight boys and four girls studying schoolbooks out in the open—with no school and no teacher—and he promised to return and build them a school. Greg sent out 580 letters appealing for funds and got one check, from Tom Brokaw. Eventually he found other donors and sold his car, his books, and even his beloved climbing gear to raise the money. Ever since, Greg has been building schools throughout the region, following the lead of local people in each instance.

  Greg became famous as the school-builder of Pakistan and then Afghanistan, always working in remote areas and always focusing on girls’ schools. “You educate a boy, and you’re educating an individual,” Greg says, quoting an African proverb. “You educate a girl, and you’re educating an entire village.” More recently, Greg has been training graduates in maternal health care and adding a medical component to his programs. Greg wrote about his work in his powerful book, Three Cups of Tea, and it’s the kind of grassroots, rural program with local buy-in that has often been most successful in the developing world.

  Alas, it’s also atypical, and Western aid efforts have been particularly ineffective in Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. After the American-backed victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, well-meaning aid groups dispatched hardy young Americans to Kabul. They rented homes and offices—sending Kabul real estate prices through the roof—and bought fleets of white SUVs. Kabul nightlife boomed, restaurants and DVD shops sprouted, and Kellogg’s corn flakes appeared in grocery stores. On a weekend evening in Kabul, you could drop by a restaurant catering to aid workers and see $1 million worth of SUVs parked out front.

  The flood of aid programs targeted Afghan women, and they did some good. But typically they didn’t reach far into the countryside, where they were most needed. Moreover, many Afghans felt threatened by Christians or Jews entering their country, walking around naked (by Afghan standards), and urging women: Learn to read! Get a job! Empower yourself! Throw off your burka! One aid group, innocently trying to gather names of local people for a database, asked for the names not only of men in each household, but also of women and girls. That was perceived as scandalously intrusive.

  Sakena Yacoobi visiting one of her clinics, in Herat, Afghanistan (Afghan Institute of Learning)

  Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.

  At the other extreme of effectiveness is Sakena Yacoobi, a force of nature who runs an aid organization called the Afghan Institute of Learning. Short and stout, her hair bundled in a scarf, waving greetings to one person while bantering in rapid-fire English with another, Sakena is perpetually in motion. Perhaps the reason fundamentalists haven’t silenced her yet is that she herself is an Afghan Muslim, less threatening than an outsider. 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.

  Sakena grew up in Herat in northwestern Afghanistan, and although she was accepted by Kabul University, she couldn’t attend because of the violence at the time. So she traveled halfway around the world to Stockton, California, attending the University of the Pacific on a scholarship as a premed student. Afterward, she studied public health at Loma Linda University (while bringing thirteen members of her family to safety in the United States). But Sakena wanted to help her people
, and so she moved to Pakistan to work in the Afghan refugee camps, where she tried to provide health care and education. She began by opening a girls’ school in Peshawar with three hundred pupils; a year later, she had fifteen thousand students. The Taliban barred girls from getting an education in Afghanistan, but Sakena nonetheless opened a string of secret schools for girls there.

  “It wasn’t easy, and it was very risky,” she recalls. “I negotiated that if people supplied houses and protected the schools and the students, then we would pay the teachers and provide supplies. So we had thirty-eight hundred students in underground schools. We had rules that the students would arrive at intervals, no men were allowed inside, and people would work as lookouts.”

  The operation was immensely successful, protecting eighty secret schools and suffering only one Taliban raid. “That was my fault,” Sakena admits. “I allowed an Englishwoman to visit, and the children talked and the Taliban raided the next day. But we had advance warning, and so the teacher dispersed the children and turned the classroom into a regular room of the house. It was okay in the end.”

  Sakena’s operation for Afghan refugees in Pakistan was even larger and included a university for women as well as literacy classes for adults. Once the Taliban fell, Sakena moved her Afghan Institute of Learning back to Kabul, and she now provides education and other services for 350,000 women and children in Afghanistan. The institute has 480 staff members, 80 percent of them women, and it operates in seven provinces. Many of the women students at Kabul University are graduates of her programs.

  The institute runs a teacher-training program, as well as workshops that focus on teaching women their legal rights both in civil law and Islamic law. That’s a sensitive issue, of course, but it is more palatable to the clerics when it comes from a Muslim woman in a head scarf than from American infidels.

  “Education is the key issue for overcoming poverty, for overcoming war,” Sakena says. “If people are educated, then women will not be abused or tortured. They will also stand up and say, ‘My child should not be married so young.’”

  The institute teaches religion as well, but in a way that might horrify fundamentalists. Moderate passages from the Koran are taught, so that women can direct their husbands to passages that call for respect for women. Often it is the first time that either women or men have realized that there are such verses in the Koran.

  Sakena runs an archipelago of fixed and mobile health clinics, which offer Afghans family planning services and free condoms. Another fundamental part of her work involves economic empowerment measures. “When people have empty stomachs, they can’t learn,” she says. So the institute offers classes in a range of skills that enable women to earn an income. These include sewing, embroidery, hairstyling, and computer science. Young women who can master computer skills can get jobs as soon as they graduate for $250 per month, several times what most young men earn.

  Sakena has now been widely recognized for her work, and UNFPA and other groups channel assistance through her. Bill Drayton’s team selected Sakena to be the first Ashoka Fellow from Afghanistan. She is indeed one of the great social entrepreneurs of Afghanistan (a perfect model for Ellaha, the young Afghan woman in jail, if she isn’t murdered by her father), and constantly in danger. She shrugs it off.

  “Every day there is a death threat.” She laughs. “I’m always changing cars, changing bodyguards.” It pains her, as a pious Muslim, that some fundamentalists want to kill her in the name of Islam. She leans forward and becomes even more animated. “From my heart, I tell you: If they were educated, they would not behave like that. The Koran has quotation after quotation that says you must treat women well. Those people who do bad things, they are not educated. I am a Muslim. My father was a good Muslim, and he prayed every day, but he did not try to marry me off. There were many offers for me when I was in the sixth grade, and he said no.

  “That is why these people are afraid of educating women—they are afraid that then the women will ask questions, will speak up…. That’s why I believe in education. It is such a powerful tool to overcome poverty and rebuild the country. If we took the foreign aid that goes to guns and weapons and just took one quarter of that and put it into education, that would completely transform this country.”

  Sakena shakes her head in exasperation, and adds: “The international community should focus on education. On behalf of the women and children of Afghanistan, I beg you! If we are to overcome terrorism and violence, we need education. That is the only way we can win.”

  * Examination of the hymen obviously is an unreliable gauge of virginity. But it is perceived as reliable enough in poor countries with low levels of education, and woe to the girl who has lost hers.

  * Landes is correct that Iranians often call baby boys doudoul tala, or “golden penis.” But this is not necessarily evidence of gender bias, since Iranians call baby girls an equivalent: nanaz tala, or “golden pubic area.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Investing in Education

  If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

  —DEREK BOK

  As a newly married couple living in China almost twenty years ago, we came to know a scrawny thirteen-year-old girl in the hardscrabble Dabie Mountains of central China. The girl, Dai Manju, lived with her mother, father, two brothers, and a great-aunt in a dilapidated wooden shack on a hillside, a two-hour hike from the nearest road. The family members had no electricity, no running water, no bicycle, no wristwatch, no clock, no radio—virtually no possessions of any kind—and they shared their home with a large pig. The family could afford to eat meat just once annually, to celebrate the Chinese New Year. There was almost no furniture in the dim shack except for a coffin that the father had made for the great-aunt. “I’m healthy now,” the great-aunt explained cheerfully, “but it’s best to be prepared.”

  Dai Manju’s parents were elementary school dropouts and barely literate. They didn’t see much point in girls getting an education. Why would a woman need to read or write when she was going to spend her days hoeing fields and darning socks? The school fee—$13 a year for elementary school—seemed a waste of the family’s tattered banknotes when the money could be used for something useful, like buying rice. So when Dai Manju was entering the sixth grade, they told her to drop out of school.

  A short, thin girl with stringy black hair and a timid air, Dai Manju was a head shorter than an average American thirteen-year-old would be. She couldn’t afford textbooks or even pencils and paper, but she was the star pupil in her grade, and she yearned to continue her education.

  “My parents were ill, and they said they couldn’t afford sending me to school,” she said shyly, looking at her feet and speaking so quietly she was barely audible. “Since I am the oldest child, my parents asked me to drop out and help with the housework.” She was hanging around the school, hoping to learn something even if her parents wouldn’t pay the fees, and she still dreamed of becoming the first person in her family to graduate from elementary school. The teachers doted on Dai Manju, giving her old bits of pencils and scraps of paper, hoping to support her studies, and they introduced us to her when we first visited the school. On our next visit, Dai Manju led us on a four-mile hike up a foot trail to her shack to visit her parents.

  Dai Manju, an unwilling sixth-grade dropout, in front of her school in China, with her principal (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  We wrote an article about her in 1990, and a sympathetic reader in New York wired us $10,000 to pay for her tuition, through his bank, the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. We conveyed the donation to the school, which was exultant. “Now we can educate all the children here,” the principal declared. “We can even build a new school!” The money was indeed used to construct a much-improved elementary school and to provide scholarships for girls in the area. When a fair amount of the money had already been spent, we called the donor to give him a report.

  “You were very, very generous,” we said, genuinely enthused. �
��You wouldn’t believe how much difference ten thousand dollars will make in a Chinese village.”

  There was a startled pause. “But I didn’t give ten thousand dollars,” he said. “I gave a hundred.”

  After some investigation, it turned out that Morgan Guaranty had erred. We called up a senior Morgan Guaranty executive and asked him on the record if he intended to dispatch bankers to force children to drop out of school to make up for the bank’s mistake.

  “Under the circumstances,” he said, “we’re happy to make a donation of the difference.”

  The villagers were mightily impressed by American generosity—and carelessness. Since Dai Manju was the one who had inspired the gift, the authorities provided her with tuition-free schooling as long as she was able to pass exams. She finished elementary school, junior high school, high school, and then the equivalent of accounting school. She found work in Guangdong Province, as an accountant for local factories. After she had worked there for a couple of years, she found jobs for friends and family members. She sent growing sums of money home to her family, so that her parents became among the richest in the village. When we made a return visit a few years ago, Dai Manju’s parents were rattling around a six-room concrete house (the great-aunt had died). There was still a pig, but it lived in the old shack, which was now a barn. The family had electricity, a stove, a television, and a fan.

  Dai Manju married a skilled worker—an expert in molding—in 2006 and had a baby girl the following year, when she was thirty years old. She was working as an executive in a Taiwanese electronic company in the town of Dongguan, but she was thinking of starting her own company. Her boss agreed to support her, and it seemed to offer her an opportunity to become a dakuan, or tycoon.