Empowerment of women urged

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists shed light on sale, abuse of females in other parts of world

By PAUL GRONDAHL, Staff writer


TROY-- Nicholas Kristof is surely the only journalist on the planet who submitted this on a newspaper expense form: Purchase of two girl sex slaves in Cambodia, $350.

He dutifully got receipts for his $150 and $200 purchases -- which bought the teenagers' freedom from a Phnom Penh brothel -- and the New York Times reimbursed its op-ed columnist.

"I knew I had a great front-page story, but I was leaving these girls behind and that felt very exploitative," Kristof said of his scheme to buy the girls. He first ran it past a Times lawyer, who did not deny the request since there was no formal policy covering such.

Kristof and his wife and co-author, Sheryl WuDunn, spoke Tuesday to the students of Emma Willard School, a private school for girls in Troy, about the couple's non-traditional, award-winning journalism. Their work has illuminated the oppression of girls and women in the developing world while advocating for gender equality in education and employment opportunities.

WuDunn called bridging the gender divide "the central moral challenge of the 21st century."

Backed by color images projected on a huge screen above the stage of EMPAC on the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus, the couple told simple human stories about girls they had met and interviewed and their hard lives, mired in heartbreaking situations of abuse and neglect in male-dominated cultures in China, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Uganda.

They spoke of a school in rural China and a 13-year-old girl whose family could not afford its $13 tuition. They planned to pull their daughter out of school, condemned to a future of toiling in the fields. With donations sent to the Times, the couple was able to give thousands of dollars to upgrade the school and they paid for the girl, the brightest in her grade, to continue her education. She ended up getting a degree in accounting and helped her parents build a new home.

Not all of their stories had happy endings. In Ethiopia, WuDunn described meeting emaciated girls who were nothing but skin and bone while their brothers were well-fed. In India, they learned that girls have a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys.

In addition to gender abuse, the oppression of girls is undercutting these poor countries' economic development efforts. WuDunn quoted Bill Gates, who told an audience in Saudi Arabia that they were doomed to trail rich nations for as long as they failed to "fully utilize half the talent in your country" by keeping girls down and offering only boys the chance at an education and skilled jobs.

"Women and girls are not the problem. They are the solution," WuDunn said.

The couple discussed their latest book, "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," a best-seller now in its 17th printing after it was first published last fall.

Kristof joked that his wife "holds up about two-thirds of the sky in our household." They have three children and live in Westchester County.

"This is not a zero-sum game," Kristof said of his efforts to give voice to the voiceless females around the world. "Men become the beneficiaries when women succeed."

Kristof and WuDunn became the first couple in 1990 to win the Pulitzer Prize jointly for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006 for his stories on the genocide in Darfur. He has traveled to 140 countries for his far-ranging Times column, which highlights human rights abuses around the globe.

Neither of them projected the gung-ho self-importance stereotypical of foreign correspondents who like to swap war stories. A Cornell MBA and Princeton MPA, WuDunn comes off as poised and business-like, while Kristof, also a Harvard grad, seems soft-spoken and mild-mannered.

In the question-and-answer period, Kristof offered this advice to the students: Travel and engage the world, even the dark places. "You have to get outside your comfort zone," he said. "If it's always fun, something is wrong."

Kristof received the loudest whoops and cheers from the students when he wished happy birthday to Emma Willard. The event, which included a lunch and afternoon discussions with the journalists, coincided with the 223rd birthday of the school's founder, a woman ahead of her time when it came to notions about education, gender and equity in early 19th-century America.

Paul Grondahl can be reached at 454-5623 or by e-mail at pgrondahl@timesunion.com.