Women: The Untapped Resource

In their latest book, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn challenge readers to act on one of the great human rights issues of our time: gender inequality. Supporting education and opportunities for women and girls around the world is crucial, they say, to combating the problem and tapping one of the world’s greatest resources. In the following excerpt, they cite Heifer as one of the organizations getting it right.

An excerpt from Half the Sky

by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

NEARLY EVERYONE WHO WORKS in poor countries recognizes that women are the Third World’s greatest underutilized resource. “The first thing we learned is that men are often untrainable,” said Bunker Roy, who runs Barefoot College, an India-based aid organization that operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America. “So now we work only with women. We pick a woman from Afghanistan, from Mauritania, from Bolivia, from Timbuktu, and in six months we train her to be a barefoot engineer” working on water supplies or other issues.

Almost invariably around the globe, countries and companies that have deployed women according to their talents have prospered. “Encouraging more women into the labor force has been the single biggest driver of Euro-zone’s labor market success, much more so than ‘conventional’ labor market reforms,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a research report in 2007. Likewise, public companies that have more women executives consistently perform better than those with fewer women. One study of America’s Fortune 500 companies found that the one-quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35 percent higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest proportion of female employees performed nearly 50 percent better than those with the lowest. In each case, the most likely reason isn’t that female executives are geniuses. Rather, it is that companies that are innovative enough to promote women are also ahead of the curve in reacting to business opportunities. Conversely, companies—or countries— that subjugate women will hold themselves back.

Consider the costs of allowing half a country’s human resources to go untapped. Women and girls cloistered in huts, uneducated, unemployed and unable to contribute significantly to the world, represent a vast seam of human gold that is never mined. The consequence of failing to educate girls is a capacity gap not only in billions of dollars of GNP but also in billions of IQ points.

Psychologists have long noted that intelligence as measured by IQ tests has risen sharply over the years, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect, after a New Zealand intelligence researcher named James Flynn. The average American IQ, for example, rose by 18 points from 1947 to 2002. Over 30 years, the IQ of Dutch conscripts rose 21 points and those of Spanish schoolchildren by 10 points. One scholar estimated that if American children of 1932 had taken an IQ test in 1997, then half of them would have been classified as at least borderline mentally retarded.

The cause of the Flynn Effect isn’t fully understood, but it affects primarily those with lower scores, who may not have received adequate nutrition, education or stimulation. Iodine deficiency is a factor in some countries. As people become better nourished and better educated, they perform better on intelligence tests. Thus it’s no surprise that a particularly large Flynn Effect has been detected in developing countries such as Brazil and Kenya. The IQ of rural Kenyan children rose 11 points in just 14 years, a pace greater than any Flynn Effect reported in the West.

Girls in poor countries are particularly undernourished, physically and intellectually. If we educate and feed those girls and give them employment opportunities, then the world as a whole will gain a new infusion of human intelligence— and poor countries will garner citizens and leaders who are better equipped to address those countries’ challenges. The strongest argument we can make to leaders of poor countries is not a moral one but a pragmatic one: If they wish to enliven their economies, they had better not leave those seams of human gold buried and unexploited.

One of the groups that has increasingly focused on women for these pragmatic reasons is Heifer International, an aid organization based in Arkansas that gives cows, goats, chickens and other animals to farmers in poor countries. Its head is Jo Luck, a former state cabinet official in Arkansas under then-governor Bill Clinton. On assuming the presidency of Heifer in 1992, Jo Luck traveled to Africa, where one day she found herself sitting on the ground with a group of young women in a Zimbabwe village. One of them was Tererai Trent.

Tererai is a long-faced woman with high cheekbones and a medium brown complexion; she has a high forehead and tight cornrows. Like many women around the world, she doesn’t know when she was born and has no documentation of her birth. She thinks it may have been in 1965, but it’s possible that it was a couple of years later. As a child, Tererai didn’t get much formal education, partly because she was a girl and was expected to do household chores. She herded cattle and looked after her younger siblings. Her father would say: Let’s send our sons to school, because they will be breadwinners. “My father and every other man realized that they did not have social security and hence they invested in male children,” Tererai says. Tererai’s brother, Tinashe, was forced to go to school, where he was an indifferent student. Tererai pleaded to be allowed to attend, but she wasn’t permitted to do so. Tinashe brought his books home each afternoon, and Tererai pored over them and taught herself to read and write. Soon she was doing her brother’s homework every evening.

Terarai Trent kneels to retrieve a tin can where she first buried her goals to achieve a proper education during a September visit to her Zimbabwe home. She's working on her dissertation to complete her Ph.D.

Tererai’s husband barred her from attending school, resented her literacy and beat her whenever she tried to practice by reading a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage, but had no way out. “If you’re a woman and you are not educated, what else?” she asks.

Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and the other young women, Jo Luck kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word “achievable.” The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what “achievable” meant. That gave Jo Luck the chance to push forward. “What are your hopes?” she asked the women, through the interpreter. Tererai and the others were puzzled by the question, because they didn’t really have any hopes. Frankly, they were suspicious of this white woman who couldn’t speak their language, who kept making bewildering inquiries. But Jo Luck pushed them to think about their dreams, and, reluctantly, they began to think about what they wanted. Tererai timidly voiced her hope of getting an education. Jo Luck pounced and told her that she could do it, that she should write down her goals and methodically pursue them. At first, this didn’t make any sense to Tererai, since she was a married woman in her mid-20s.

There are many metaphors for the role of foreign assistance. We like to think of aid as a kind of lubricant, a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world, so that gears move freely again on their own. That is what Heifer International’s help amounted to in this village: Tererai started gliding along freely on her own. After Jo Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study frantically, while raising her five children. She went away to her mother’s village to escape her husband’s beatings. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: “One day I will go to the United States of America,” she began, for one goal. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D.—all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattleherder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year of formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.

Then Tererai took correspondence classes and began saving money. Her self-confidence grew as she did brilliantly in her studies, and she became a community organizer for Heifer. She stunned everyone with her superb schoolwork, and the Heifer aid workers encouraged her to think that she could study in America. One day, in 1998, she received notice that she had been admitted to Oklahoma State University.

Some of the neighbors thought that a woman in her 30s should focus on educating her children, not herself. “I can’t talk about my children’s education when I’m not educated myself,” Tererai responded. “If I educate myself, then I can educate my children.” So she climbed into an airplane and flew to America.

At Oklahoma State, Tererai took as many credits as she possibly could and worked nights to make money. She earned her degree and then returned to her village. She dug up the tin can under the rock and took out the paper on which she had scribbled her goals. She put checkmarks beside the goals she had fulfilled and buried the tin can again.

Heifer International offered Tererai a job, and she began work in Arkansas—while simultaneously earning a master’s degree part-time. When she earned her M.A., Tererai again returned to her village. After embracing her children and relatives, she dug up her tin can and checked off her most recently achieved goal. Now she is working on her Ph.D. at Western Michigan University, and she has brought her five children to America. Tererai has finished her course work and is completing a dissertation about AIDS programs among the poor in Africa. She will become a productive economic asset for Africa, all because of a little push and helping hand from Heifer International. And when she has her doctorate, Tererai will go back to her village and, after hugging her loved ones, go out to the field and dig up her can again.

Excerpted from HALF THE SKY by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.