Quotes from Nicholas D. Kristof

You educate a boy, and you're educating an individual," Greg says, quoting an African proverb. "You educate a girl, and you're educating an entire village.

When women could vote, suddenly their lives became more important, and enfranchising women ended up providing a huge and unanticipated boost to women's health.

Numbers are difficult to calculate in part because sex workers can't be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily. Some commentators look at prostitutes and see only sex slaves; others see only entrepreneurs. But in reality there are some in each category and many other women who inhabit a gray zone between freedom and slavery.

The reality is that past efforts to assist girls have sometimes backfired. In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would have banned imports made by workers under the age of fourteen. Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.

The left often refers nonjudgmentally to "sex workers" and tends to be tolerant of transactions among consenting adults. The right, joined by some feminists, refers to "prostitutes" or "prostituted women" and argues that prostitution is inherently demeaning and offensive. The result of this bickering is a lack of cooperation in combatting what everybody believes is abhorrent: forced prostitution and child prostitution.

America's schools rarely convey much understanding of the 2.7 billion people (40 percent of the world's population) who today live on less than $2 a day.

Because identity and self-esteem are closely tied to work, a poorly paying job may still be better for well-being than no job. In surveys, self-reported happiness drops ten times as much from a loss of a job as from a major loss of income. Long-term jobless men are three times as likely

One of the reasons that so many women and girls are kidnapped, trafficked, raped, and otherwise abused is that they grin and bear it. Stoic docility—in particular, acceptance of any decree by a man—is drilled into girls in much of the world from the time they are babies, and so they often do as they are instructed, even when the instruction is to smile while being raped twenty times a day.

The police were very class conscious," Usha noted. "So if you were lighter-skinned, then they thought you were higher class and they might help. But they would swoop down on anyone darker-skinned or unshaven. Often, people went to the police to complain, and then the police arrested them," Usha said. One woman went to the police to report that she had been gang-raped by Akku Yadav and his thugs; the police responded by gang-raping her themselves.

In almost every conflict, mortality is disproportionately male. But whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world.

Maternal mortality is an injustice that is tolerated only because its victims are poor, rural women. The best argument to stop it, however, isn't economic but ethical. What was horrifying about Prudence's death was not that the hospital allocated its resources poorly, but that it neglected a human being in its care.

Studies on the impact of abstinence-only programs aren't conclusive and seem to depend to some extent on the ideology of those conducting the study. But on balance, the evidence suggests that they slightly delay the debut of sexual activity; once it has been initiated, however, kids are less likely to use contraception. The studies suggest that the result is more pregnancies, more abortions, more sexually transmitted diseases, and more HIV.

Women's empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.

This phenomenon, called guimai funu, exists on a vast

Another Western aid group, trying to improve the hygiene and health of Afghan women, issued them bars of soap—nearly causing a riot. In Afghanistan, washing with soap is often associated with post-coital activity, so the group was thought to be implying that the women were promiscuous.

woman is promised a job in a factory or restaurant in a coastal

One legacy of this policy blunder is that 70 million Americans now have a criminal record, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That's slightly more than the number of Americans with a college degree, and we have more jails and prisons than four-year colleges.

THE AMERICAN ECONOMY HAS DAZZLED the world and its stock markets have created great riches, but the median American household is actually poorer in net worth today than it was in 2000.

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

The best role for Americans who want to help Muslim women isn't holding the microphone at the front of the rally but writing the checks and carrying the bags in the back.

Several studies have found that child poverty costs the United States about $ 1 trillion each year in increased health, crime, prison and welfare spending as well as in reduced earnings. That's about $ 8,000 per household annually. Most researchers find that each dollar invested in reducing child disadvantage would save the country at least $ 7.

America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans:

was given as a first-world citizen, and I believe it is my responsibility to work so that these opportunities are available to all.