175 A study in Kenya by Michael Kremer: Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel, and Rebecca Thornton, “Incentives to Learn,” manuscript, updated January 2007.
176 “We find little robust evidence”: Raghuram G. Rajan and Arvind Subramanian, “Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?” The Review of Economics and Statistics 90, no. 4 (November 2008): 643.
176 Yet when Bono spoke: TED International Conference, June 2007. Mwenda and Bono had a widely discussed run-in over aid effectiveness there. See also Nicholas D. Kristof, “Bono, Foreign Aid and Skeptics,” The New York Times, August 9, 2007, p. A19.
Ann and Angeline
179 Angeline Mugwendere’s parents: Some material here comes from a pamphlet, I Have a Story to Tell (Cambridge, U.K.: Camfed, 2004), p. 11.
182 Half of Tanzanian women: Figures for abuse by teachers in South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda come from Ruth Levine, Cynthia Lloyd, Margaret Greene, and Caren Grown, Girls Count: A Global Investment & Action Agenda (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2008), p. 54.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Microcredit: The Financial Revolution
188 Muhammad Yunus: See Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (New York: Public Affairs, 2003); David Bornstein, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Phil Smith and Eric Thurman, A Billion Bootstraps: Microcredit, Barefoot Banking, and the Business Solution for Ending Poverty (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007).
192 A remarkable study: Edward Miguel, “Poverty and Witch Killing,” Review of Economic Studies 72 (2005): 1153.
193 The economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo: Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 141.
194 In Ivory Coast: Esther Duflo and Christopher Udry, “Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Côte d’Ivoire: Social Norms, Separate Accounts and Consumption Choices,” Yale University Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 857.
194 In South Africa: Esther Duflo, “Grandmothers and Granddaughters: Old-Age Pension and Intra-Household Allocation in South Africa,” World Bank Economic Review 17, no. 1 (2003): 1–25. Cash transfers to grandmothers did not improve the height and weight of their grandsons, only of their granddaughters. Another study found an inconsistent result: When these new pensions went to South African men, children looked after by those men increased their schooling more than when the new pension went to women. The author himself was startled by his result, and it is an outlier. Eric V. Edmonds, “Does Illiquidity Alter Child Labor and Schooling Decisions? Evidence from Household Responses to Anticipated Cash Transfers in South Africa,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 10265.
194 “When women command greater power”: Esther Duflo,“Gender Equality in Development,” BREAD Policy Paper No. 011, December 2006, p. 14
195 To its credit the U.S. government: A similar project is the Women’s Legal Rights Initiative, backed by the U.S. Agency for International Development. See The Women’s Legal Rights Initiative: Final Report, January 2007 (Washington, D.C.: USAID, 2007).
197 the conventional wisdom in development circles: One study found that the more women in a country’s parliament, the less corruption. But that may say more about the countries that elect women than about the women MPs themselves. Europe is not very corrupt and elects many women, but those facts aren’t necessarily related; rather, they may both be functions of a well-educated postindustrial society.
197 One fascinating experiment: Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova, “Unappreciated Service: Performance, Perceptions, and Women Leaders in India,” and “Why Political Reservation?” Journal of the European Economic Association 3, nos. 2–3 (May 2005): 668–78, http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/ 794. Another paper looked at the spending of female village leaders in India and found that they were more likely to elicit participation from women and to spend money on issues of concern to women, such as drinking water. Raghabendhra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India,” Econometrica, 72, no. 5 (September 2004): 1409–43.
197 Whatever the impact: Grant Miller, “Women’s Suffrage, Political Responsiveness, and Child Survival in American History,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 3 (August 2008): 1287.
CHAPTER TWELVE The Axis of Equality
205 “A woman has so many parts”: Lu Xun, “Anxious Thoughts on ‘Natural Breasts,’” September 4, 1927, in Lu Xun: Selected Works, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), p. 355. Lu Xun is among the greatest of modern Chinese writers, a brilliant polemicist for human rights and the equality of women.
205 Zhang Yin: David Barboza, “Blazing a Paper Trail in China,” The New York Times, January 16, 2007, p.C1. Another quote came from a Bloomberg article that appeared in China Daily: “U.S. Trash Helps Zhang Become Richest in China,” January 16, 2007. Information also came from “Paper Queen,” The Economist, June 9, 2007. Zhang Yin is sometimes also known as Cheong Yan, which is the Cantonese version of her name. Zhang Yin was edged out as China’s richest person in 2007 by another woman, though not a self-made one. Yang Huiyan was given ownership by her family of its real estate company, Country Garden, and its public offering left her worth $16 billion. That made her richer than Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, and Steve Jobs. David Barboza, “Shy of Publicity, but Not of Money,” The New York Times, November 7, 2007, p.C1. The economic crisis beginning in 2008 has undoubtedly changed all of these wealth figures.
208 The sex ratio of newborns: Some evidence suggests that the rising incomes of women will lead to a self-correction of the sex-selective abortion that has produced a shortfall of girls. For example, one of the cash crops that has been booming in coastal China is tea, and women are generally perceived as having an advantage in harvesting it because they are shorter and have smaller hands. The number of “missing girls” dropped significantly in the tea-growing areas compared to areas producing other crops. One scholar found that increasing incomes overall had no effect on sex ratios, but that rising female incomes reduced the sex ratio disparity. Each increase in women’s income amounting to 10 percent of family income led to an increase in the survival rate of girls of 1 percentage point. Nancy Qian, “Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China: The Effect of Sex-Specific Income on Sex Imbalance,” manuscript, December 2006. See also Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
210 Leading Indian business executives: In one respect, neglect can benefit girls in India. One study found that in Mumbai, low-caste boys continue to follow traditional routes by attending Marathi-language schools and then finding employment through the caste network. The boys were helped by these social networks but also were locked into low-level jobs. Because girls didn’t matter and traditionally were outside the networks, they were allowed to choose English-language schools. Once the girls learned English, they were able to compete for well-paying jobs. Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig, “Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern World: Caste, Gender, and Schooling Choice in a Globalizing Economy,” The American Economic Review 96, no. 4 (September 2006): 1225–52.
210 Sweatshops have given women a boost: A feminist critique of trade has emerged that disputes our arguments; it asserts that young women are often exploited and preyed upon in sweatshops. There is an element of truth to such charges. Trade-based factories are grim and exploitative, but they are still better than the alternative of life in the village—and that’s why women seek the factory jobs. The feminist critique argues that globalization led to an erosion of traditional socialist ideas about equality. All that is true, but socialist ideology was too divorced from economic reality to be more than a fragile foundation for gender equality. We can’t do justice to the feminist critique here, but see The Feminis
t Economics of Trade, ed. Irene Van Staveren, Diane Elson, Caren Grown, and Nilüfer Çagatay (New York: Routledge, 2007); Feminist Economics (July/October 2007), a special issue about China; Stephanie Seguino and Caren Grown, “Gender Equity and Globalization: Macroeconomic Policy for Developing Countries,” Journal of International Development 18 (2006): 1081–1104; Yana van der Meulen Rodgers and Nidhiya Menon, “Trade Policy Liberalization and Gender Equality in the Labor Market: New Evidence for India,” manuscript, May 2007. Additional resources reflecting this approach—much more skeptical about the benefits to women of trade than we are—are to be found at the International Gender and Trade Network, www.igtn.org. Our own view is that this critique is sound about the shortcomings of trade but greatly undervalues the benefits.
211 As the Oxford University economist Paul Collier has noted: Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 168–70.
211 Rwanda is an impoverished, landlocked, patriarchal society: For a discussion of gender in Rwanda, see Rwanda’s Progress Towards a Gender Equitable Society (Kigali: Rwanda Women Parliamentary Forum, 2007). Rwanda also empowers women sexually, through two little-known practices that are almost unique in their emphasis on female sexual pleasure. One is the custom among Rwandan women (along with some Baganda women in Uganda) of stretching their genitals as children, in a manner intended to enhance their sexual pleasure as adults. The second practice is called kunyaza, and involves sex that focuses on clitoral stimulation, without penetration. Again, the main purpose is to give the woman sexual pleasure. Leana S. Wen, Thoughts on Rwandan Culture, Sex and HIV/ AIDS, manuscript dated February 2007; and Sylvia Tamale, “Eroticism, Sensuality, and ‘Women’s Secrets’ Among the Baganda: A Critical Analysis,” 2005, www.feministafrica.org.
Tears over Time Magazine
216 Zainab Salbi: See Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund, Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny, Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam (New York: Gotham Books, 2005).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Grassroots vs. Treetops
221 Soranos of Ephesus: Soranos’s original textbook on gynecology is lost, but two Latin translations survive. The quotation on performing a clitoridectomy comes from the seventh-century Latin translation of Paulus of Aegina, as found in Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 164 n. 58; the illustration from a 1666 German textbook is reproduced in Brooten’s book as figure 12.
222 3 million girls are cut annually: Changing a Harmful Social Convention: Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, Innocenti Digest no. 12 (New York: UNICEF, 2005, 2007). This is also a useful source of data about the geographic reach and incidence of FGC. The person who has written about cutting the longest, ever since 1978, and the most comprehensively, is Fran P. Hosken, author of The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females, 4th rev. ed. (Lexington, Mass.: Women’s International Network News, 1993). Hosken has estimated that a total of 149 million women are cut. See also Agency for International Development: Abandoning Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: An In-Depth Look at Promising Practices (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development, 2006), especially pp. 29–38.
A much more limited practice of disfigurement also designed to keep girls chaste is breast ironing. In Cameroon, weights, bands, or belts are used to flatten the breasts so that girls will be less likely to end up raped or seduced. Cameroonian parents calculate that in a world in which girls are prone to abuse, the best way to protect a daughter is to disfigure her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN What You Can Do
235 Two scholars: Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade,” International Organization 53 (Autumn 1999): 637. This is an outstanding article, and the figures we cite for the price Britain paid in confronting the slave trade draw from it.
235 William Wilberforce: William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: Harcourt, 2007). Hague and Senator Brownback are among the modern politicians who say they have been inspired by Wilberforce.
235 “If anyone was the founder”: “Slavery: Breaking the Chains,” The Economist, February 24, 2007, p. 72.
237 Swanee Hunt: Swanee Hunt, “Let Women Rule,” Foreign Affairs (May/ June 2007): 120.
239 “Encouraging more women”: Kevin Daly, Gender Inequality, Growth and Global Ageing, Global Economics Paper No. 154, Goldman Sachs, April 3, 2007, p. 3.
239 One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies: “The Bottom Line on Women at the Top,” BusinessWeek, January 26, 2004. This particular study was conducted by Catalyst, but similar studies have often been conducted over the years with the same results. Parallel research on the Japanese economy has been conducted by Kathy Matsui of Goldman Sachs; see her pathbreaking report, Womenomics: Buy the Female Economy, Goldman Sachs Investment Research, Japan, August 13, 1999. Since then, Matsui has written a series of follow-ups and helped coin the term “womenomics.”
240 developing countries such as Brazil and Kenya: R. Colom, C. E. Flores-Mendoza, and F. J. Abad, “Generational Changes on the Draw-a-Man Test: A Comparison of Brazilian Urban and Rural Children Tested in 1930, 2002 and 2004,” Journal of Biosocial Science 39, no. 1 (January 2007): 79–89.
240 The IQ of rural Kenyan children: B. Bower, “I.Q. Gains May Reach Rural Kenya’s Kids,” Science News, May 10, 2003; Tamara C. Daley, Shannon E. Whaley, Marian D. Sigman, Michael P. Espinosa, and Charlotte Neumann, “I.Q. on the Rise: The Flynn Effect in Rural Kenyan Children,” Psychological Science 14, no. 3 (May 2003): 215–19.
243 The civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements: Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially p. 204. See also David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (New York: Wiley, 2007).
243 In South Korea: Hunt, “Let Women Rule,” is the source for information about South Korea and Kyrgyzstan.
243 In the nineteenth century: Stephanie Clohesy and Stacy Van Gorp, The Powerful Intersection of Margins & Mainstream: Mapping the Social Change Work of Women’s Funds (San Francisco: Women’s Funding Network, 2007).
244 In the United States, a 2006 poll found: Scott Bittle, Ana Maria Arumi, and Jean Johnson, “Anxious Public Sees Growing Dangers, Few Solutions: A Report from Public Agenda,” Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, Fall 2006.
244 two new studies: The Brazil study is Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea, “Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil,” manuscript, March 2008. The India study is Robert Jensen and Emily Oster, “The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women’s Status in India,” manuscript, July 30, 2007, p. 38.
246 the UN should have a prominent agency: Nobody has been more articulate than Stephen Lewis in calling for a UN agency to focus on women. See Stephen Lewis, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa (Berkeley, Calif.: Publishers Group West, 2005).
249 Social psychologists have learned a great deal: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006). See also Alan B. Krueger, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur Stone, “National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life,” draft paper, March 31, 2008.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, and WuDunn was the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer. They were foreign correspondents and editors for The New York Times, winning their Pulitzer for coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy protests. At The Times, WuDunn also worked as a television newscaster and a business executive. She now is in business in New York. Kristof, a Rhodes Scholar, is now an op-ed
columnist for The New York Times and earned a second Pulitzer for his columns about genocide in Darfur. The authors live near New York City with their three children.
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kristof, Nicholas D., [date]
Half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide / Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27315-4
1. Women’s rights—Developing countries—Case studies.
2. Women—Crimes against—Developing countries—Case studies.
3. Women—Developing countries—Social conditions—Case studies.
I. WuDunn, Sheryl, [date] II. Title.
HQ 1236.5.d44k75 2009
362.8309172′4—dc22 2009012270
v3.0
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide Page 33