Nicholas Kristof: clueless AND very boring (and wants to talk about gender)

"By locating the problems they describe in the “developing world,” Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn surely paint too rosy a picture of what happens to women in richer countries. There, they say, “discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss.” Tell that to the 18 percent of women in the United States who, according to the authoritative National Violence Against Women Survey, say they have experienced rape or attempted rape. Acknowledging misogyny close to home helps us think better about its sources and possible remedies...There’s one weak chapter, called “Is Islam Misogynistic?” Although the authors ultimately suggest that the answer, at least historically, is “no,” their account of the religious history is too superficial to be useful. Nor do they give a systematic account of the wide range of contemporary movements that are both Islamic and feminist. Along the way, they feed some stereotypes that readers are all too likely to hold. “Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominantly Muslim,” they write. If we confine ourselves to these two examples, the statement may be true (although genital cutting has no basis in Islam). “Such as,” however, suggests a longer list. The authors have already told us that maternal mortality is a particularly large problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Muslims are not in a majority. (The annual United Nations Human Development Report confirms this.) Their account of forced prostitution highlights the problems of countries that are not predominantly Muslim (e.g. India, Thailand, Cambodia), as well as of some Muslim nations. We’ve been given no reason to suppose that Muslim nations do worse. Later, moreover, the authors praise Muslim-majority Bangladesh as a shining example of what can happen when a nation decides to invest in women and girls...The gravest problem, one that the authors mention but never treat in detail, is the basic denial to girls of life itself, whether through infanticide, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood, or the increasingly common practice of sex-selective abortion. Here the nations of East Asia leap into prominence. The natural ratio of girls to boys at birth is typically taken to be 95 to 100. In Singapore and Taiwan, the figure is 92 girls to 100 boys, in South Korea 88, in China only 86. These figures reflect only sex-selective abortion, and not deaths after birth from infanticide or differential nutrition and medical care. The overall sex ratio, which does include these deaths, is even more striking: China and South Korea have two of the most unbalanced sex ratios in the world. We’d have to discuss those figures (worse than those of almost all majority-Muslim nations) before making any responsible statement about which cultures are more or less misogynistic. In the same chapter the authors make a rare inaccurate statement. “Hindu women in India are more autonomous and more likely to be educated than their Muslim women neighbors.” But the only comprehensive survey of Muslim women in India, the highly regarded 2005 study by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, concluded that (adjusting for poverty level, since Muslims are a relatively deprived group in most parts of the nation) the significant differences are regional rather than religious. “Religion per se does not influence the status of women,” they summarize. Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn, so curious elsewhere, seem unaware of this well-known evidence. In short, why not just confront each manifestation of misogyny where one finds it, rather than play a ratings game that fits too neatly with widespread political prejudices?"