When they started Half the Sky, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and former Times reporter and editor Sheryl WuDunn were already award-winning journalists and authors, with a happy marriage and three kids. But there was one issue the couple felt needed their attention: the challenges faced by women in developing nations.
It took more than two years to convince publishers to take a chance on their idea, which eventually became Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, due in bookstores on September 8. But Kristof and WuDunn were not happy with just writing a book that tells stories of women’s struggles. They wanted to create a grassroots movement to raise awareness of the cause, and show people how to make a difference. “What we’ve written is a sort of do-it-yourself foreign aid tool kit. We hope to inform people, but also really help them figure how they can go about making a difference.”
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Kristof and WuDunn are also giving back themselves: They put part of the advance for Half the Sky toward founding a middle school in Cambodia, launched HalfTheSkyMovement.org, a Web site devoted to spreading their message, and are planning other projects to tie into the book, including a Web-based game and a telethon.
The couple will be honored with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement later this month, which will join the Pulitzer Prize the couple won in 1990 — becoming the first married couple to do so. While they work on Half the Sky-related projects, including a book tour later this year, Kristof is continuing to write his NYT column and WuDunn is planning to go back to work in the financial industry later in the fall. mediabistro.com caught up with the busy duo to discuss how their journalism backgrounds informed Half the Sky, their interest in women’s rights, and what it’s like to work together while raising a family together.
What is Half the Sky all about?
WuDunn: The book is about the major challenges that women in the developing world face. We talk about mass rape, sex trafficking and maternal mortality. We went to countries where these problems are the most formidable, and we talked to women who have been through these challenges and survived. We tell their stories. It really is stories about women and what they’ve done, what they’ve been through, what they’ve endured and how they’ve survived and been able to change the world around them. It’s extremely amazing to meet some of these women who, against all odds, have emerged triumphant. It makes you ask yourself, ‘If I were in those shoes, would I do the same?’
| Kristof: “If there were a Chinese dissident who was tortured or imprisoned, we’d write about that, and it might very well end up as a front-page story. Meanwhile, there are tens of millions of people who had been discriminated against to death, and we never really gave it a column inch.” |
Kristof: But we don’t want to imply that this is a book about mass rape. This is really a book about how to overcome global poverty and how to create more stable societies.
WuDunn: Basically, the thrust is that this is the moral challenge for our century. If we do not empower and educate women, then the world cannot begin to tackle poverty and extremism and we cannot advance U.S. interests. It’s kind of odd that we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t treat women as human beings.
Did the idea to write a book about this topic grow out of any of your previous coverage of human rights and China?
WuDunn: The idea started to simmer while we were in China from 1988 to 1993. As journalists, we were always taught to report facts, be balanced and not take a side, which we did. But it surprised us that as we were covering the pro-democracy demonstrations in China at Tiananmen Square, there was a lot more going on in the countryside that was just horrendous, such as female infanticide. Somehow we discovered a statistical report on demography that basically suggests that there were 60 million-plus women and girls who were missing out of the population in China, which was a result of female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, and under-reporting. Worldwide, that number is anywhere from 60 million to 100 million missing women and girls if you include India and Africa — where women die early from childbirth. When you see something like that, how can you not want to help?
Kristof: It also made us wonder about journalism and how we go about it. If there were a Chinese dissident who was tortured or imprisoned, we’d write about that, and it might very well end up as a front-page story. Meanwhile, there are tens of millions of people who had been discriminated against to death, and we never really gave it a column inch. We began brooding about this, wondering what does constitute news? And the more we looked through this lens of gender discrimination in all of Asia, we realized that it was a helpful way of looking at the world and that was the process that started and eventually led to Half the Sky.
How did you go about getting a book deal for a topic like this, which was so under-reported?
Kristof: Initially, we were enthusiastic about this idea because it seemed very important to us. It also seemed to us that if you want to overcome poverty, you have to do it through educating and empowering women. It wasn’t immediately obvious to book publishers that this was going to be a book that would sell a ton. So we talked about it for two or three years and they came around and saw that A), it was important and that B), there would be an audience. Now we all feel that there is an audience, and we hope that we’re at a tipping point where this issue really is getting traction. It sure seems to us that it is.
WuDunn: And now our publisher is solidly behind it. It’s just amazing. The turn has been amazing.
Why do you think that your publisher changed its view of your book’s topic so dramatically?
WuDunn: The tipping point is very much related to what’s happened in the U.S. For example, with Hilary Clinton as the new Secretary of State, she cares about these issues. Obama has appointed a council on women and girls and supported a new ambassador for global women’s issues. Companies now are really growing their social responsibility programs and a number of prominent companies are focusing on women and girls, including Wal-Mart.
Kristof: Anti-poverty organizations and aid groups have increasingly come to the conclusion that if you really want to make a difference at the grassroots level, then often the way to do that is to work through women and girls. The dirty little secret of development is that men often have an amazing capacity to misspend money. That’s why microfinance tends to focus on women. When you create earnings opportunities for men, then the money is more likely to go toward buying beer, for example, or prostitution, or some kind of extravagant festival. And if you put that spending power in the hands of women, it’s more likely to go toward educating their children or toward starting a small business. It’s hugely humiliating as a man to admit that, but it has increasing been recognized and I think it’s one more reason why there has been this focus on women as a engine in the fight to overcome poverty.
WuDunn: It turns out that there really is such a thing as a maternal instinct after all!
| Kristof: “When you create earnings opportunities for men, then the money is more likely to go toward buying beer, for example, or prostitution, or some kind of extravagant festival. And if you put that spending power in the hands of women, it’s more likely to go toward educating their children or toward starting a small business.” |
Do you think that your work on your previous books and their success helped you sell this one?
Kristof: They taught us how to write books. It really is different to write a book than to write a news article or a column. They taught us a lot. Writing about China especially gave us a framework for looking at this issue, because China is an example of a country that 100 years ago was just about the worst place in the world to grow up female, thanks to foot binding, infanticide, child brides and concubinage. Then China really transformed itself, and today it is a pretty good place to grow up female, at least in the cities. And that is really what has explained the huge economic transformation of China.
WuDunn: Female employment has explained it. It really helped jump-start the economy.
Kristof: They went from using half their population to using all of it, essentially.
WuDunn: But more importantly, for a place like China, if you look at all of the clothes that we wear and the shoes that we walk on and the bags that we carry, they were all made starting a decade and a half or two decades ago by women in those factories that we call sweatshops. But sweatshops really can be an elevator out of poverty to an economic future because if you’re a woman, what are the jobs available in developing countries? There is construction or farming or things where women don’t really have an advantage. But in the factories, where they need nimble fingers and sewing skills, they have a competitive advantage and they can build a skill base. So for all the horrors of sweatshops, for women with very few opportunities, it’s a ladder out of poverty.
| WuDunn: “We figure it’s a lot easier to work on a book than it is to raise kids together.” |
Later this month, you will be receiving the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. What was your reaction when you heard you were going to be given this prize?
Kristof: We felt way too young to be winning a lifetime achievement award. We thought, we’re over the hill now!
WuDunn: We were surprised, absolutely surprised.
What other projects are you working on now?
Kristof:Half the Sky is intended to be not just a book but — it sounds grandiose to say it — a way to help kick start a broader movement. To that extent, we’ve started a Web site called HalfTheSkyMovement.org, and Sheryl’s been working on a game.
WuDunn: We are planning to have a Web-based game that will launch in November or December. Then in spring or summer 2010, we’re planning a television special that is a modern telethon that uses sketch comedy, performance, documentary clips and celebrities to really highlight the issue. And in the fall of 2010, we are coming out with a series of documentaries that we’re hopefully going to work with PBS on.
Kristof: The thought is that we don’t just want to preach to the choir. We want to expand those who really understand and care about the issue. So we hope the game, for example, will be an entry point that will then get people to dig deeper.
As a husband and wife team that has worked together for many years, you seem to have the partnership thing figured out. How do you make it work?
WuDunn: It’s funny. When I was at The New York Times, we worked at the same office, we worked together and it was really fun and we worked very well as a team. But in a place like China, you almost need a teammate because at that time it was so much us against them. So that was very helpful. But we never traveled together, and we always had our separate portfolios, separate stories. But we came together to write our books. More recently, I was working in the financial industry and he was writing the column, so we never intersected, and the book was able to bring us together again. We work well together. We figure it’s a lot easier to work on a book than it is to raise kids together.
Kristof: The book doesn’t play you off each other. It pretty much just sits there.
Kristof and WuDunn’s tips for raising awareness through writing:
1. Start from the ground up. “In writing Half the Sky, we looked at movements in the past and what worked and what didn’t work,” Kristof said. “It seems to us that top-down efforts basically don’t work. What you need is grassroots, bottom-up movement to make a difference.”
2. Don’t exaggerate. “Advocates often exaggerate because they care passionately about these issues,” Kristof explained. “That tends to turn off people who might otherwise climb on board. Being very rigorous about your claims actually is a more successful strategy than pounding the table and making exaggerated claims.”
3. Check out the research. “There’s been a lot of really interesting research in the field of social psychology that helps shed light on how you get people to care,” Kristof said. “There is work in particular by a man called Paul Slovic, he’s done a lot of experiments that I found really illuminating.”
4. Stick to the stories. The research in social psychology Kristof and WuDunn used advised them to focus on storytelling. “In our book, of course, we do focus on storytelling, how to tell the story, what kind of story to tell,” WuDunn said. “And in the documentary series, we’ll also focus on storytelling and how to tell these stories in a very compelling way.”
5. Find your interests. “The hardest thing is to really think carefully about what it is that you like,” WuDunn said. “If want to get involved in something, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time with it, so it’s going to have to be something that really moves you.”
Amanda Ernst is editor of FishbowlNY.
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