Half the Sky Main Ideas

Oppression

Kristof and WuDunn argue that in many countries in the developing world, girls and women are considered less than human. They are often viewed as commodities that can be sacrificed for the benefit of the family (as shown in Chapter 5’s discussion of “honor killings”) or the profit of criminal enterprises (as discussed in the introduction and Chapter 1). The oppression of women is rationalized by highly patriarchal cultural norms that reinforce the view of women and girls as property or objects. Once families, communities, and nations come to view women as expendable, there is little or nothing that can be done to protect girls and women from the worst and most horrific forms of exploitation and inhumane treatment. Even in countries that have laws on the books to protect women from the harshest abuses, such as sex trafficking, the prevailing culture often leads to widespread defiance or evasion of the law.

Commercial sexual exploitation of girls is an extreme and, as the authors show, widespread form of female oppression. Girls are sold to brothels for the profit of sex traffickers, and the brothels hold them captive and profit by forcing them into sexual slavery. In some cultures, men and their families demand abject submission from their wives, who may be burned alive, disfigured with acid, or murdered if they disobey their husbands or act in a way that shames their family. Laws against such treatment of women are, again, routinely ignored or unenforced in such societies.

Female oppression does not always involve physical abuse or murder. The refusal to educate girls so they can participate fully in society and perhaps enter the workforce to earn money is a form of female oppression. But in societies where females are considered inferior, the dominant patriarchy sees no reason to expend resources on girls’ education. In fact, some patriarchal organizations, such as the Taliban, actively oppose the education of girls.

Empowerment

Girls and women are empowered when they achieve recognition as full human beings. The empowerment of girls usually begins with providing them with an education that becomes the foundation of a fully realized, fulfilling, and useful life. The empowerment of women frequently begins with providing them with a microloan that enables them to start their own small businesses to earn money for themselves and their families. Sometimes organizations dedicated to empowering women will fund their training or apprenticeship as they learn useful and marketable skills that will provide them with income and raise them and their family out of poverty. The stories of Saima Muhammad and Goretti Nyabenda in Chapter 11 illustrate the difference even a small loan can make.

Empowerment depends on first freeing women from inhumane subjugation, such as sex trafficking. Once freed from such subjugation, the authors of Half the Sky suggest, there should be no limit to the achievements women can realize as they exercise their innate intelligence and talent within their society. The work of empowering women, as described by Kristof and WuDunn, therefore has two goals: to provide the educational and business opportunities women need to succeed and to work to weaken or dispel the patriarchal cultural bias that views girls and women as second-class citizens. Women can achieve a degree of empowerment in a patriarchal society, but only if rigid patriarchal views are overcome can women take their place alongside men as equal human beings and full participants in society.

Barriers to Gender Equality

Societal and cultural views of women as less than human are the foundation of the barriers put up against the advancement of women in the family and in society. When men deny or ignore the full humanity of women, they continue to put up and reinforce barriers to women’s progress. Many specific types of abuse are predicated on this kind of denial. For example, girls and women can be sold into sex trafficking only when they are viewed as property in the first place. Their suffering is not acknowledged or opposed because, in the view of those who control the police force, the government, and the household, they exist for the benefit of men.

Several more specific barriers sit atop this foundation. The refusal to educate girls or train women in marketable skills is often an insuperable obstacle to their achieving equity with men. The view that female children are less valuable than male children, to the point that they are sometimes killed or left to die, is another huge barrier to gender equality, as is the view that women are servants, not partners, within the household. Laws that enshrine these biases, like the legal acceptance of bride abduction in Ethiopia, only reinforce the barriers. Where laws do protect women, poor enforcement or corrupt police practices often render them ineffective. What’s more, the attitudinal barriers reinforce the practical barriers and vice versa: when biases discourage the education and employment of women outside the home, women have fewer opportunities to challenge those biases. Many of the initiatives described in Half the Sky have the aim of breaking this cycle at a key step, whether by providing education to girls or economic empowerment to women.