Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Kristof and WuDunn began reporting on international affairs in the 1980s, when “the oppression of women was a fringe issue” (xiii). Like many reporters at the time, the authors didn’t view women’s rights as a significant issue. They thought the Tiananmen Square massacre they witnessed in 1989, in which China’s Communist rulers killed between several hundred and 10,000 protestors (the actual death toll remains unknown), was one of the worst human rights violations they’d witnessed during their reporting careers.

However, in 1990 they came across a shocking and horrifying statistic: “[T]hirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive—and that is just in the first year of life” (xiv). To put this in perspective, potentially the same number of infant girls die in a week as the total death toll at Tiananmen Square. In contrast to Tiananmen Square, however, the deaths of these infants don’t receive news coverage. This statistic resulted in Kristof and WuDunn questioning whether their “journalistic priorities were skewed” (xiv).

The authors turned their investigative reporting to other countries in the Global South where they saw a similar pattern emerge. The authors suggest that one failure of journalism is that it doesn’t cover everyday events.