Gendercide Is More Than a Female Issue
Sheryl WuDunn, co-author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, doesn’t like making gendercide a female issue. “We need to make this a humanitarian issue,” she says.

The first Asian-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, Sheryl is a business executive, entrepreneur, journalist, and author with special expertise in Asia and global women’s issues. She and her husband, Nicholas Kristof, were in Beijing, China during the protests and massacre at Tiananmen Square. And like most journalists, they covered the 1989 event, which grabbed headlines around the world.

“The news media tend to cover things that happen on a particular day, not those things that happen every day,” says Sheryl. “Things like poverty generally don’t get much attention.”

When they read about a study that indicated 39,000 baby girls were dying each year because they didn’t have the same access to food and health care as boys, they reexamined their journalistic priorities. And it led them to write Half the Sky. The book, the title taken from a Chinese proverb that says, “Women hold up half the sky,” shines a spotlight on the most serious issues facing women in developing countries: sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality.

And the statistics are shocking.

“More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, just because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century,” claims Sheryl in the book. And it’s impossible for countries to climb out of poverty without women participating in the workforce. And education is a significant part of the solution.

She tells the story of a 13-year-old girl in China who lived in a hut with her family and a large pig. With no running water and limited resources, the parents pulled their daughter out of school, but she was determined to get an education. Every morning, she hiked two hours to school and waited outside the school building just to absorb some of the educational environment.

“It’s important to educate boys, but educating girls brings a higher return. It reduces birth rates; people with more education have higher incomes, and women are more likely than men to use extra income to educate their children and start small businesses,” says Sheryl.

Educating girls may be the single, most cost-effective way to empower and modernize society,” says Sheryl. Quoting Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and former chief economist at the World Bank, she says, “education is such a great investment that the question is not whether we can afford to educate girls, but whether we can afford not to.”

Bill Hybels recently interviewed Sheryl’s husband and co-author about about turning oppression into opportunity for women around the world. Check out the message ‘We Give’ – but don’t wait too long, the video is only available through May 18!

As part of our ‘Deadline Party’, we’re giving away a copy of Half the Sky to one lucky winner. Just tweet this post and leave us a comment about why you’re interested in the book. We’ll randomly choose one winner Tuesday at 3:00.