Half the Sky: Women and Leadership

Introduction

The most successful book in the U.S. at this time, the home page on Amazon.com, is an outstanding journalistic work called Half the Sky: how to change oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. Women hold up half the sky, says the Chinese proverb that gives rise to the title. But these women, considering the world as a whole, are beaten, raped, left to die and ignored and no one is giving enough importance to that situation. The American journalist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, the Chinese-American journalist Sheryl WuDum have written a formidable argument to help to understand that the struggle for women's rights in the developing world is a battle similar to that fought in his day against totalitarianism or against slavery. "I think this is one of the most important books I've read in my life," writes in amazement, Carolyn See, The Washington Post critic. "This book aims to change a dynamic paradigm," says the prestigious New York Review of Books. How is it that is not news that 100,000 girls are kidnapped every year in China for installation in brothels?

Thesis Statement

The role of women in the modern era.

Discussion

This book, Half the Sky is not about settling scores or gender equitable distributions. This is the story of many women in the world today. We are the half, the worst half, come to say journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (his wife, Chinese American, told in his lapel, is the first citizen of Asian descent to win a Pulitzer prize, celebrate it). Both have written a remarkable text, detailed sense of the conditions in which they survive millions of them, victims of abuse, hunger, exploitation and trafficking of death foretold by just being born female. We are a much discriminated half. And given data: in the last fifty years have killed more children than men in all the battles along the twentieth century (www.nytimes.com).

"Women hold up half the sky," sang Ruby Turner, a British-Jamaican vocalist R & B in the eighties. But as he discovered the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, in a paper published ten years later, a hundred million women are missing. That is, statistically, are born and should be alive, but they are not, because they died before their time,

Why is it taking up half the sky today The formidable impact? Perhaps because it is beautifully written (and Kristof are WuDum Pulitzer Prizes), but mainly because it is a lot of research and data collection provided an intelligible and full of strength. It is a book made with the best journalism in the world, the two professionals who looked around and were amazed at what they saw. Kristof and WuDum were in China when the Tiananmen slaughter occurred and wrote pages and pages about this violation of human rights. Then tell themselves, ran into a dark and thorough demographic study which stated that each year 39,000 children die in China because their parents are not given the same medical care than ...