Women in the world

HONG KONG — As newly minted Beijing bureau chiefs for The New York Times, Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof covered the Tiananmen Square massacre, earning a Pulitzer Prize for their work.

Though they were horrified by the killings, they soon realized the press and the public were willfully ignoring a bigger story — the deaths of unwanted baby girls, at a rate of 39,000 a day.

That story — and ongoing neglect and violence toward women and girls — inspired their new book, "Half The Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide."

The book is passionate and provocative — sure to rile critics and, they hope, move people to act. For more on the topic, I spoke recently with Sheryl WuDunn.

Here are the highlights:

Part of your argument is that empowering women makes good economic sense. How so?

If you economically empower a woman, she represents enormous opportunity that can actually be transformative not only for her family and for her community, but at the aggregate level for the economy.

Look at what happened in China, where they educated everyone. They actually said girls could go to school, then they also said girls could get jobs in the formal labor force. That meant that they were able to get factory jobs. These are terribly toiling jobs, but they bring an income. That means she can send money to her family, which immediately raises her status within the family.

China’s economy was jump-started because a lot of women were working in the factories that make the clothes and the handbags that we Americans buy.

Why did you write this book, and why now?

The book is the result of many years of research and thinking. We wrote the book, basically, because when you see some of the horrible things that have been done to women in the developing world it is really hard to walk away from them.

You argue that cultural practices can, and sometimes should, change. Explain.

If something is really outrageous, it doesn’t matter if it is one culture, or another, it’s outrageous. Foot binding was outrageous. My grandmother’s feet were bound. Boy, am I glad that there were people in China — and outside of China — that said this is outrageous, it should be stopped.

Same thing goes with genital cutting. It’s not that Americans should take a megaphone and say, ‘This is bad.’ That really isn’t the right way to do it and would not bring about success.

The way to do it is to work with local people, local change-makers, and support them. They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the know-how, the infrastructure — that’s where the West can help. Helping, not, blaring, ‘This is the American way.’

Speaking of the American way, are you optimistic about where things are going in terms of foreign policy and women?

I think what Secretary Clinton has been doing has been really remarkable. She’s gone to Goma, in the Congo, which is the rape capital of the world. There has been no secretary of state who has ever been there to highlight this issue. That was remarkable for her to do.

And then she pushed through a U.N. resolution that focused on violence against women in areas of conflict. That is just a really important thing for a secretary of state to do. She has tried to move the global establishment, which is great.

You use the term "gendercide.” What does that mean?

We discuss in the book how there are 60 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, missing girls and women. They have been discriminated to death, whether it’s aborted before they are even born, whether they die in childbirth — one women dies a minute in labor of childbirth around the world.

This is the moral challenge of our time. In the same way that slavery was the moral challenge of the 19th century, the brutality that so many people in so many countries face because of their gender this really is the cause of our time

But this isn’t a new problem. What makes this the moral challenge of our time?

The slave trade in the 1770s and 1780s, was about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World a year. Right now, the trafficked across international borders, according to the State Department, is 10 times that number. And that is just trafficking across borders, because we don’t have documented evidence of much of what goes on within borders.

It’s getting worse, it really is. And it’s just horrific that we have allowed it to grow to this extent.