Shining A Light On Global Oppression Of Women

The list of sins against women in the United States is long.

We still badly lag our male counterparts in pay.

We just about outnumber men in college but are only a fraction of the bosses in business.

We just about outnumber men in law school, too. But there are only two women on the Supreme Court.

We work outside the home but still handle most of the chores in it.

We are in regular danger of having our reproductive rights revoked.

Our daughters are muscled out of the way in science classes. They share only a fraction of the purse in sports.

But those grievances seem like just so much whining when put up against the cruelties visited upon women in the other half of the world: sex slavery, death in childbirth, mass rape, honor killings, genital cutting and the simple indifference of fathers and mothers to their infant daughters.

Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times, and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn - the first married couple to have won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting - have published a book detailing what it might mean to developing countries in economic and political stability if they ceased the systematic abuse and devaluation of women and instead educated and employed them.

"Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide" is the title, and it refers to the Chinese saying, "Women hold up half the sky."

But as the authors retell the stories of individual women in Africa and South Asia and the cruelty they suffered, it becomes an ironic title.

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn were assigned to the Times' Beijing bureau, and among their first assignments was the massacre of Chinese students protesting for democracy in Tiananmen Square.

But in the next year, the authors found a little-noticed demographic study that showed 39,000 baby girls - many times the number of students killed in the square - die annually in China because their parents do not give them the same nutrition and medical attention they give their infant sons.

"We began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed," they write.

The authors call the brutality inflicted on women and girls "the paramount moral challenge" of this era.

That this is wrong on so many levels in indisputable. But what is equally evident in the stories of individual women and in supporting data is that educating women and harnessing their energy can do more to lift a country out of poverty than all the foreign aid ever given.