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The CGD Podcast
Fighting Gender Inequality with the Power of the Keyboard – Nick Kristof
00:16:16
Nicholas Kristof, renowned journalist and columnist for the New York Times, explains how he came to value the "keyboard and notebook" as his greatest tools against injustice, and highlights the importance of empowering local change makers within a...
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- [00:06]
A
Hello, I'm Rajesh Merchandani. Thanks very much for joining me for this edition of the CGD podcast. My guest today is probably more used to asking the questions. He's Nicholas Kristof, who you'll know as a respected and renowned journalist, a columnist for the New York Times, who's written for many years on human rights, women's rights, global affairs. He's won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the other for the genocide in Darfur, along with many other awards. And along with his wife, Cheryl wudun, he's written several books, including A Path Appears, which focused on finding effective, impactful solutions to many social problems, and Half the Sky, number one best seller about the need to combat oppression of women and girls in developing countries and the economic and social benefits of gender equality. Nick, it's great to have you here. Thanks for joining us.
- [00:53]
B
Great to be with you.
- [00:55]
A
Let's just go back a little bit and just find out from you. I think people were really interested to know, how did you first get started or interested in writing about human rights? Was there one thing that happened that was a catalyst for you?
- [01:07]
B
Well, I kind of grew up with it, in a sense. My dad was a World War II refugee, and my parents were both very engaged in human rights issues, Amnesty International. And so I kind of absorbed it as a young child and then. But I have to say, I was in danger of becoming a lawyer. I went to law school, and fortunately, setting property law rescued me from my delusions. That would be an interesting career. And then when I first joined the New York Times, I was actually covering international economics. But then sort of, I'd say, over the course of years as a foreign correspondent, meeting people and seeing what the human stakes are, watching people getting massacred by their governments, that led me to believe that my weapon against those kind of abuses is my keyboard and my notebook.
- [02:13]
A
And.
- [02:13]
B
And so when you see these things in front of you, it's very hard to forget them and just to wander off back to the world of international economics.
- [02:27]
A
How powerful do you think that weapon is?
- [02:32]
B
Not powerful enough. But I think that it does raise the costs of oppression, that in general, and norms have changed to some degree. People used to brag about genocide, for example, in the Bible, there are repeated occasions of God ordering genocides against Amalekites, for example. And yet now governments still periodically will engage in a genocide, but they do it quietly. They're a little embarrassed about it. And when somebody is shooting video of it or writing about it, Then it's an embarrassment and doesn't always prevent it. It does raise the costs and creates a little bit of accountability.
- [03:22]
A
Do you feel that there's one particular issue or one particular story that you've told that you think that you feel you can see a link to a difference being made? That's always often the thing that we question. We ask, how do we know the impact of our work?
- [03:38]
B
You know, I think there are a few where at the margins, I've had some modest impact in getting more attention to them. One was the Darfur slaughter, one was obstetric fistula and maternal health more broadly. And maybe another is sex trafficking at home and abroad.
- [04:01]
A
Well, we congratulate you for the effect that you had and also of those issues. Let's talk about something you've written a lot about, which is the economic case for women's rights for gender equality. Maybe this came out of your covering international economics. How do you think the position of women has changed in the years that you've been working in this area? And what have you seen that has impressed you or depressed you?
- [04:21]
B
I think there's been tremendous improvement in the role of women worldwide, partly based on literacy that until shortly before I was born, a majority of the world population had always been illiterate. Now about 90% of adults are illiterate.
- [04:44]
A
They can all enjoy your column.
- [04:46]
B
Well, I wish that would be a business model. And in elementary schools worldwide, and primary schools, there's now no gender gap in attendance, which is pretty remarkable. In secondary schools there is a gender gap, but it's diminishing. And when girls become educated, then they have, you know, they have greater ability to earn money, they have greater control over assets, they're less likely to get beaten up. They have more influence more broadly on society. They have. Their fertility diminishes. So you're less likely to have this big youth bulge in the population that is linked to civil conflict, terrorism, this kind of thing. So on those fronts, I think there has been real progress.
- [05:40]
A
And of course, gender equality now has its own goal, sustainable development goals. Are you confident about the ability of the world to actually achieve that or any of the goals?
- [05:53]
B
I'm not sure that the outside pressure makes that much difference on the goals or on the role of women in and of itself. But I do think that there are internal pressures within so many countries that are leading to those better outcomes. I think that people, you know, as I said, more people are going to school that makes such a difference. When girls are educated and those educated women raise their Children differently, both their sons and their daughters. I'm always struck that in poor countries I often ask about the bride price. I was just in South Sudan last week and so typical bride price would be about 60 or 70 cows. Huge, huge, huge amount of money. In every country that I've done these interviews. One of the factors that greatly affects a bride price is whether a girl is educated. If she is more educated, she will get a much higher bride price than if she's illiterate. That affects parents decisions as well about whether to educate their daughters.
- [07:08]
A
So it's still terribly unequal though, isn't it? An educated bride is worth more still putting a monetary or value on a woman that you wouldn't on a man.
- [07:20]
B
I mean, in some societies you do in the form of a dowry. But it's true that, I mean, ideally one would move beyond bride prices and dowries, but to the extent that it reflects value judgments within a society and creates incentives for educating daughters, then it's one, it's one window of how poor families are making decisions about whether to educate their daughter or not. I guess I tend to think that when outsiders say educate your daughters, that that tends not to be terribly effective and in some countries can create a backlash. What does tend to work is things like school feeding programs, which initially were intended as a nutrition program, turned out not to be very effective for nutrition because basically parents, if they know that their kid's going to be fed in school, they're less likely to give the child breakfast at home. They turn out to be very effective as an education program because they create an incentive to send your child to school.
- [08:22]
A
It's like the deworming program.
- [08:23]
B
Yes, yes.
- [08:25]
A
I mean, you talked about creating opportunity for girls and empowerment of girls and education of girls, but at the same time they're still oppressed in many ways. Things like female genital mutilation, cutting, stoning, honor killings, things like that. What should the world do about that? Because you have the weight of custom, tradition, thousands of years of it. And here we come from the rich outside world telling people what to do.
- [08:53]
B
I think that people sometimes ask whether we should defer to cultural practices like these and whether it isn't cultural imperialism to protest fgm, for example. I don't think it is. I think that in general we should be deferential. But at some point when you have fundamental violations of human rights, when 3 million girls a year are being cut in Africa, then then there is a need for a global response. But I do think that we should be sensitive in the way we go about it. And if our response is to thunder at people and say FGM is brutal oppression, then that tends to create a backlash. Instead, what tends to work best is when we empower local change makers within society.
- [09:52]
A
Have you seen that happening?
- [09:53]
B
Yes. And you see that with fgm, that the top down efforts essentially accomplish nothing over decades. But meanwhile you have some local grassroots efforts like Tostan in West Africa. There are similar ones in Ghana and Egypt that you know, where often people who cut their daughters, they think that this is what good Muslims do in Muslim countries. And if you have the imam saying this isn't in the Koran. In Saudi Arabia they don't cut girls, then that has a lot more power than some kind of American saying, oh, that's barbaric. So these, I think empowering changemakers from within a society. Likewise in education in Afghanistan, for example, I think groups like brac, because it is a Bangladeshi organization where the aid workers are all Muslims, I think that tends to go over better than it does when it's Americans, you know, and if you put an American flag on a girl's school, that's the kiss of death.
- [10:59]
A
Yeah, I think you're probably right there. Here at cgd, we've been doing some research on fgm and we were looking at Burkina Faso, which is a country that has a strong tradition of civil society and government opposition to fgm. And we looked at the passing of a national law that banned the practice in 1996, and it seems to have made a big difference in decreasing its prevalence. What do you think the role is for national laws? I mean, is it enough to outlaw a practice or is there more that needs to be done?
- [11:34]
B
Laws are not enough. And I have in here the CGD article on the Burkina Faso case. I just got it, I haven't read it yet. But in Sudan, for example, the first laws against FGM were passed in the 1920s. In guinea, cutting a girl is punishable with a death sentence if the girl dies and by life imprisonment otherwise. And yet 99% of girls in guinea are cut. So I tend to think we have over emphasized laws and under emphasized the social change element. And also just the basic question, I mean, if you are a loving parent in these countries, you may well want to cut your daughter so that she can get married. The fear is that if I don't get my daughter cut, then nobody will want to marry her. And that one has to address that and come at it from within. And when that happens, things can change very quickly. In Senegal attitudes change very quickly. In China, foot attitudes towards foot binding changed very, very quickly. But one has to address those marriage market issues.
- [12:53]
A
Talking about marriage market issues, the price of women on, or the empowerment of women. One of the directors of CGD's Gender and Development Programme, Charles Kenny, has been recently putting together a proposal to improve women's employment rates by encouraging US firms to, to put it loosely, boycott gender apartheid. So to work to mitigate the impact of laws that restrict women's equality in the workplace, what do you think is the role that corporations should, can and must play in helping to achieve gender equality?
- [13:27]
B
Boy, I think that corporations can have a huge role. The scale of corporate employment, for example, of corporate sourcing of products, the supply chains, the scale of all that is so great that they can have infinitely greater impact on societies than anything NGOs do. So I'm a great believer in working with companies to try to model better behavior, better practices on gender, but also on other issues, on issues of corruption, you know, sexuality, all kinds of issues that I think can play a hugely constructive role that so far they often haven't.
- [14:18]
A
Are you optimistic about the future for gender equality? If we're sitting here in 2030, the end of the timeline for the SDGs to pick an arbitrary date, are we going to be talking about what needs to be done? Are we going to be talking about what a great place we're in?
- [14:34]
B
Well, given the human capacity to carp, I think we're talking about how much work needs to be done. But I also do think that there will be progress. I mean, I think that there has been tremendous progress on gender in the last 15, 20 years. And, you know, part of it is that we tend to be worst at addressing issues that are hard to talk about. Anything involving sex, you know, we fgm, because it involves genitals, is awkward to have these conversations, and we're getting a lot better at that. And I think everybody understands that the reasons for addressing gender inequity are not just ones of social justice, but also about economic development and international security. And when you have the Pentagon arguing for gender for girls education, for example, because it's going to make our troops safer, that carries a weight that any number of bleeding heart New York Times columnists does not. So I think that there will be continued progress. But I also think that by 2030, we won't have achieved the Holy Grail yet.
- [15:47]
A
Nick Kristof, a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for joining us.
- [15:49]
B
Great to be with you.
- [15:50]
A
You can find out more about all the work that CGD's been doing in all the areas that Nick's interested in as well. On our website, cgdev.org his column, of course, in the New York Times. And don't forget to join me, Rajesh Merchandani, for the next podcast from the center for Global Development.