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She’s an investment banking executive who once worked for Goldman, Sachs & Co., but Sheryl WuDunn has little faith in long-revered commodities to save the global economy.
“The greatest unexploited resource in the world today isn’t oil or gold or wind. It’s women,” says WuDunn, who will speak Wednesday at the University of Oregon on the unrealized civil rights and economic promise of women in the developing world.
WuDunn is also the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, sharing journalism’s top honor with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for their coverage of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The couple have since collaborated on the best-selling book “Half the Sky.” Using examples from the lives of women around the globe, the book details what all humankind stands to gain by educating girls so they can assume more leader ship in the world’s poorest countries.
In an interview, WuDunn discussed one eye-opening passage of the book. It describes Jo Luck, head of Heifer International, talking to a group of girls in Zimbabwe. Luck’s international relief organization uses charitable donations to provide destitute families with farm animals, honeybees and other sustainable resources for overcoming hunger and poverty.
“She asked them, ‘What are your dreams, your hopes?’ ” WuDunn recounted. “But they did not understand the question. They’d never really had any dreams or hopes.”
“Half the Sky” compares the worldwide oppression of women to past struggles against slavery and calls it “the paramount moral challenge” of current times.
“Take someone I know, Srey Rath, a Cambodian teenager who was trafficked and sold to a brothel in Cambodia,” WuDunn writes in one example. “She was imprisoned there, unpaid, and raped countless times a day. In effect, she was a slave.
“But finally she was able to escape and after many adventures made her way home, where she was given help from an American named Bernie Krish er. With his help, she was able to purchase a small pushcart and goods to sell. Over the years, she struggled but was determined to succeed so that she would never have to be resold to the brothels and become another one of the countless victims of traffickers’ greed. Now she owns two stalls and specializes in hats. She has become a financial pillar for her extended family, teaching relatives about her lessons from the business world.”
WuDunn calls Srey Rath’s story a reminder of a fundamental truth about gender injustice: “Girls aren’t just the problem or the victim; they’re also the solution, and their ingenuity and courage is beginning to spread with many helping hands from the West. There is a growing realization that when you educate a girl, you educate a village.”
In a world ever smaller because of electronic communication, problems such as sex trafficking are no longer “something that happens way out there,” WuDunn said.
“These days, we live in a global world and nothing stays isolated,” she said. “The phenomenon of sex trafficking is coming to American shores. Maybe we can learn from the tactics they have developed to combat it in Malaysia and Cambodia.”
The education of women can even reduce terrorism, WuDunn said.
“The problem is that when women are marginalized in a country, particularly when its largest male cohort is young, that society takes on the habits of a jail or a locker room,” she said. “Too much testosterone can mean too much violence in societies dominated by young males. There are exceptions, of course, but when men and women have relatively equal status, women tend to be a stabilizing force. If they are educated and can work, they will raise their kids in a more enlightened way, which brings benefits to men as well as to women.”
WuDunn’s appearance is part of the UO’s Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, funded by the estate of Val and Madge Lorwin. Val Lorwin was a labor activist and UO professor of history who died in 1982.