E-mail a friendNicholas Kristof
airdate October 27, 2009
An Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof's pieces have focused attention on human rights abuses in Asia and Africa. He joined the paper in '84, covering economics, and has served as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. Kristoff is a Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar, has lived on four continents, traveled to more than 140 countries and written several books. He's won Pulitzers for journalism and for commentary. He's also a pioneer in multimedia and was the first blogger on the NYT Web site.
Pulitzer-winning journalist discusses giving opportunity to women and children in the Middle East in the face of U.S. attacks. (2:00)
Full Interview (12:42)
Nicholas Kristof
Tavis: Nicholas Kristof is, of course, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and columnist for "The New York Times." Along with his wife Sheryl he's written an acclaimed new book which sheds light on the oppression of women around the world. The book is called "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." Nick Kristof, an honor to have you on this program.
Nicholas Kristof: My pleasure.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Let me start with the definition of "Half the Sky." Why that for a title?
Kristof: It comes from a Chinese expression that women hold up half the sky, and right now that's clearly an aspiration more than a reality, but it is an aspiration that we should, I think, aim for - that men will be much better off as well if women are holding up half the sky.
Tavis: Define for me what you and your wife refer to as "gendercide." What is gendercide?
Kristof: Let me ask you a question - are there more men or women in the world today? What's your guess?
Tavis: I'd guess women.
Kristof: That's what everybody guesses, and it's incorrect. In the U.S. there are more women than men, more females, but worldwide - and that's because in the U.S. women get - girls get equal access to food and healthcare, so women live longer and so there are more of them. Worldwide there are more men than women and that's because in much of the world you get sex-selective abortion and above all you get unequal access to food and healthcare, and that's gendercide.
If you don't have enough food, you feed your son, you starve your daughter. If your son is sick you take him to the doctor; if your daughter is sick, you feel her forehead and say, "Well, let's see how you're doing tomorrow." The result is you have 60 to 100 million women who are missing on the planet, tilting the global population balance toward men, and that's gendercide.
Tavis: Yet to your point now it seems to me that these are two different things - to fight oppression on the one hand is one thing, but to turn that into opportunity is another. Let me split them up. It's a nice phrase; it rings well, turning oppression into opportunity. Let's take it one at a time, though. What do you do about the oppression of gendercide that you've just now raised for us?
Kristof: Education is probably the single best solvent of these kind of discriminatory attitudes. It's a combination of focusing on things like sex trafficking, on maternal mortality, on unequal treatment, but it's also the positive side of the equation - the education, microfinance, microsavings, other ways of empowering women, bringing them into society, into the economy.
Tavis: You fight the oppression, but how do - and you're picking up on this now, but how do you create opportunities for these women?
Kristof: Well, when you send girls to school that turns out to have just a transformative effect on societies. They have fewer children and they invest more in those children, they earn more income, and as they earn more income they then spend it more on their children and on starting business.
One of the really frankly humiliating things about researching this book as a man was that there is just an abundance of research that women spend money much more wisely than men. They're much more likely to spend money on their children and much less likely to spend it on present-day consumption. So as you get women into the work force their earnings are much more likely to benefit the next generation.
One of the reasons for poverty globally is frankly a chronic underinvestment in education, and education is a great way of breaking poverty, you get a great return on that investment. But there is below-market investment in that education and giving earning power to women tends to be one way of breaking that.
Tavis: When I look at the cover of this book I see the faces of a lot of women of color. By design?
Kristof: Yeah. This is an issue - it's not just an issue in Africa, it's a huge issue in Asia, in Latin America, it's a worldwide issue. Obviously in this country we have huge problems. But it certainly is disproportionately a problem in places like Africa, like Asia.
Tavis: How do you get traction on an issue like that, one, in a world where - when I say an issue like that I mean the issue of the oppression of women - how do you get traction on this issue when one, to your point, the world is dominated by and made up of more men, number one; number two, the people we're talking about are not just women but they're women of color, to your point now. I think you see - I could do this for the next 20 minutes. With that kind of litany how do you get traction on an issue like this, no matter how noble the cause?
Kristof: Well, I think one thing that's helped, frankly, is that since 9/11 we've been very concerned with security issues, with terrorism, with violence, and it turns out that one of the best ways to fight that kind of terrorism and fight that kind of violence is precisely to educate girls.
So these days in Afghanistan you have American generals sitting around rooms talking about girls' education, because one of the best metrics to predict stability in any given district in Afghanistan is the proportion of girls going to school. So it's great when bleeding hearts are concerned with these issues but when you get these hard-bitten generals who go from discussing air strikes one moment to girls' education in another, that gives the issue real credibility.
One of the people we talk about, one of the people who I think is on that cover is a woman in - yeah, I see half her head right there, this woman. She's in Pakistan, a country that is maybe the most dangerous in the world today. She got a $65 microloan, parlayed that into a huge embroidery business, and as a result she is now hiring half her village, she's now prospering, her children are going to school, and it's one way of rendering Pakistan less vulnerable to precisely this kind of instability, fundamentalism, extremism that we've been experiencing.
Tavis: A couple of days ago I was on "Meet the Press" and we were talking about Jane Mayer's recent piece you may have seen in "The New Yorker" about these Predator drones and the fact that Joe Biden, the vice president, really wants more of these, President Obama recently signed off on a Predator drone hit to take out one of the alleged terrorists, one of our enemies in Pakistan. You kill 17 or 18 people in the process; most of those folk are women and children. We've done the same thing in Afghanistan - women and children; the same thing in Iraq, women and children.
I want to connect that, and you've written about this, back to this book. How do we turn oppression into opportunity for women when the United States is engaged in activity - and some might say not deliberately, but nonetheless engaged in activity where women and their children end up being the victims of our activity. Does that make sense?
Kristof: Yeah. I think that one of the broader problems is that in foreign policy we instinctively reach for the military tools in the toolbox, and military tools are indeed useful at times. There are a lot of occasions in Africa in particular where I wish that we would be a little more willing to extend in peacekeepers. But there are also a lot of diplomatic tools there, and I think in the case of Afghanistan, for example, that we tend to over-invest in troops and under-invest in opening schools, for example - in Pakistan, to take precisely that example.
So we have Predators all over, we gave $15 billion to Pakistan since 9/11 - $15 billion. Now, that accomplished nothing for American interests nor for Pakistani interests. If some sliver of that had gone to education in Pakistan - it's now been eight years since 9/11 and we would be at the beginning of creating a more stable society. Right now, only 3 percent of women in the tribal areas in Pakistan are literate - only 3 percent.
Tavis: Here's a sexist question. Does it take women being presidents, women being prime ministers, women being leaders to get this issue where it needs to go? Do you think men are capable of addressing this issue?
Kristof: Men are absolutely capable. First of all there's pretty good evidence that women don't matter for a country in terms - if they are president or a prime minister. That if you look at girls' education rates they don't climb when a woman is president or prime minister. Maternal mortality rates don't drop.
It does seem to matter when women are at the grassroots level, when a woman is village chief, for example, or the head of a school district or the head of a county. That seems to matter for that grassroots area. It matters much less at the top of the food chain.
More generally, I think it's a mistake to think of this just as a women's issue. That's frankly one reason why I write about this. The Holocaust wasn't a Jewish issue; civil rights weren't a Black issue. When 100 million women are missing around the world that's not just a women's issue, that's the paramount human rights issue of our time.
Tavis: Paint a picture for me of what happens if we don't start to adequately address it now.
Kristof: Well, you can't confront poverty; you can't defeat poverty unless you channel resources toward women. It's just the most cost-effective way. The greatest resource that poor countries have isn't seams of gold and it's not oil and gas, it's the female halves of their population.
You can't address poverty unless you focus on women and you can't defeat the kind of extremism and violence and fundamentalism that right now we tend to confront with Predator drones unless you also try to empower that female half of the population.
The book originated in a sense because my wife and I lived in Asia for a long time, East Asia, and we were fascinated with the lessons from the East Asian economic boom. One of those is that they got where they are because they figured out how to use women more effectively and bring them into the formal economy.
Tavis: To your point now about your wife, of course, being the coauthor of this, what's your sense of the voice that women have or don't have in raising (unintelligible). It's great to have Nicholas Kristof as an ambassador, as a champion writing about this in this book in "The New York Times," but what's your assessment of the voices that women, the voice that women do or don't have on this issue?
Kristof: I think that when it's only women who talk about - traditionally this has been something that women raise, and that tends to result in it being immediately marginalized as a kind of a soft issue. I think in the same way that gay rights got more attention when straights began to talk about it, that likewise if men and women alike are talking about these, that that helps legitimize it as a broad security issue.
I think it also helps when the focus is less on just oppression being a bad thing and more that this is a real opportunity to fight poverty and extremism, that there is a real up side here as well.
Tavis: It's my experience in writing books where you're profiling a lot of people there's always one or two that really connect to you or you connect to them. Give me one example of that.
Kristof: There's an extraordinary woman we write about, and partly it's this - the passion I have for education. A woman called Terrarai (sp) who's a Zimbabwean woman. She was in her village, she had been brilliant in school and in fact she learned to read by doing her brother's homework. She wasn't allowed to go to school but she was doing her brother's homework when he brought it home and then finally the teacher realized something was up when her brother was getting perfect homework but doing kind of miserably in school. So after being beaten he confessed (laughter) and the jig was up.
But a woman from Heifer International went and visited them in the village and encouraged these women to write down their dreams, and she wrote about how she wanted to get an education, how she wanted to come to the U.S. to study - a series of goals she buried in a tin can in the field where she herded goats.
Then she began to work at them and she came to the U.S., she earned her bachelor's. This is a woman who's been a goatherd in Zimbabwe. Every time she achieved a goal she went back to Zimbabwe, dug up her can, checked it off, buried it again, and she is about to earn her Ph.D. in the U.S. Pretty amazing.
Tavis: Not a bad story. The new book by Nicholas Kristof of "The New York Times" and his wife Sheryl is called "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." Nick, nice to have you on the program.
Kristof: Delighted to be on.
Tavis: Congratulations on the book.
Kristof: Thank you.
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