Sheryl Wudunn Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sheryl Wudunn. Here they are! All 32 of them:

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Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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when sex is conceptualized as a need, it creates an environment that fosters men’s sense of sexual entitlement. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky illustrates how the assumption that boys require outlets to β€œrelieve their sexual frustrations” facilitates the sexual enslavement of impoverished girls. If you think of sex as a drive, like hunger or thirst, that has to be fed for survival, if you think that men in particularβ€”with their 75 percent spontaneous desireβ€”need to relieve their pent-up sexual energy, then you can invent justifications for any strategy a man might use to relieve himself. Because if sex is a drive, like hunger, then potential partners are like food. Or like animals to be hunted for food.
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Emily Nagoski (Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life)
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When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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...when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratification and more for education and starting small businesses.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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[S]ex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women's issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender, or creed.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike.
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Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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...cultural barriers can be overcome relatively swiftly where there is the political will to do so.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
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If you can capture the youth and change the way they think, then you can change the future.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Ronald Reagan had a point when he said that "the best social program is a job.
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Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn
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There's a larger social justice reason for sex educators' fighting against the myth of sex as a drive for more than a hundred years. A far worse consequence is that when sex is conceptualized as a need, it creates an environment that fosters men's sense of sexual entitlement. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book Half the Sky illustrates how the assumption that boys require outlets to "relieve their sexual frustrations" facilitates the sexual enslavement of impoverished girls. If you think of sex as a drive, like hunger or thirst, that has to be fed for survival, if you think that men in particular- with their 75 percent spontaneous desire- need to relieve their pent-up sexual energy, then you can invent justifications for any strategy a man might use to relieve himself.
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Emily Nagoski (Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life)
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One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services, but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on. Republican lawmakers don't want to pay for $500 IUDs for low-income women, so they pay $17,000 for Medicaid births. They don't want to pay to reduce lead poisoning, even though that means paying for special education classes for years to come.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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The World Health Organization estimates that 536,000 women perished in pregnancy or childbirth in 2005, a toll that has barely budged in thirty years. Child mortality has plunged, longevity has increased, but childbirth remains almost as deadly as ever, with one maternal death every minute. Some 99 percent of these deaths occur in poor countries.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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2If you love kids; if you love kids with grit; and above all, if you want to make a difference, back programs that inspire children to realize that they can grow up to be more than pawns.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Corruption, religious zeal, public skepticism may be the hallmarks not of a disintegrating country but simply of a normal nation.
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Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Hunched over the handlebars, careering around the antitank blockades, I mused at the absurdity of a profession that obliges one to rush in the direction that everyone else is running away from.
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Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Perceptions often matter more than reality.
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Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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There is no group of 900 million people about whom so little is known as the Chinese peasantry.
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Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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...randomized trials found a surprisingly positive effect from microsavings programs, which help the poor save small amounts of money. One-third of the world's population has no access to bank accounts and must resort to hiding cash somewhere, such as in a shack with no lock. Moreover, impoverished farmers often receive money in large sums just once or twice a year, after a harvest, and then they are deluged with loan requests. The result is pressure to spend money rather than save it...Then there is usury-not just on loans but also on deposits. In West Africa, villagers can deposit money with susu money traders, but they must pay 40 percent interest on their deposits!
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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...randomized trials found a surprisingly positive effect from microsavings programs, which help the poor save small amounts of money. One-third of the world's population has no access to bank accounts and must resort to hiding cash somewhere, such as in a shack with no lock. Moreover, impoverished farmers often receive money in large sums just once or twice a year, after a harvest, and then they are deluged with loan requests. The result is pressure to spend money rather than save it...Then there is usury-not just on loans but also on deposits. In West Africa, villagers can deposit money with susu money traders, but they must pay 40 percent interest on their deposits!...One of the most common models for microsavings is the village savings and loan. It is very simple and has spread around the world since being launched by CARE in Niger in 1991....It costs $25 per participant to start a microsavings group through CARE, and it strikes us as a cost-effective way to help people help themselves. Contributions to CARE can be earmarked for the village savings and loan program.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Americans sometimes hint that it's not worth saving people's lives in poor countries because then they'll just have more kids....We disagree. That Malthusian argument is a canard. In fact, it's increasingly clear that one reason some people have large families is because they expect some children to die. Give them hope that their children will live, and they'll have fewer kids. The history of demography is that after child mortality rates drop, birth rates tumble as well, after about a twenty-year lag. Indeed, we're already seeing fertility rates dropping sharply in poor countries. Indian women, for example, now average just 2.6 babies-down from almost 6 in 1950. Bangladeshi women average just 2.3 babies, and Mexican women 2.2 babies. The United Nations Population Fund calculates that the number of children under the age of fifteen will end the century no higher than it is now....The way to deal with population pressures is to reduce child mortality and support family planning and education, while planting hope.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Some liberals falsely assert that Christian aid groups help only those who are Christians (this is not true of the major organizations) and don't appreciate the scale of giving by people of faith. World Vision has 40,000 staff in roughly 100 countries-more than CARE, Save the Children, and the United States Agency for International Development combined. Some secular liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice of channeling aid through religious aid groups, even though that would cripple aid efforts. In the past five years, half of food aid in Haiti went through religiously affiliated organizations, such as World Vision, that have deep networks on the ground. ...Religious Americans actually donate more of their income to charity and volunteer more of their time than any other group. If secular liberals can give up some of their scorn, and if religious conservatives can retire some of their sanctimony, combined they might succeed in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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In recent years the explosion in social entrepreneurship has resulted in an outpouring of new initiatives and assistance: everyone wants to start something new, not join an existing program....Today there are simply too many charities, most of them tiny, inefficient, and inconsequential. We have deliberately not started our own foundation or aid group to gather contributions for causes we believe in. Instead, we point readers and viewers to the many existing ones doing great work. The last thing the world needs, we believe, is one more aid group on top of the 1.4 million already operating in America.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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Some liberals falsely assert that Christian aid groups help only those who are Christians (this is not true of the major organizations? and don't appreciate the scale of giving by people of faith. World Vision has 40,000 staff in roughly 100 countries-more than CARE, Save the Children, and the United States Agency for International Development combined. Some secular liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice of channeling aid through religious aid groups, even though that would cripple aid efforts. In the past five years, half of food aid in Haiti went through religiously affiliated organizations, such as World Vision, that have deep networks on the ground. ...Religious Americans actually donate more of their income to charity and volunteer more of their time than any other group. If secular liberals can give up some of their scorn, and if religious conservatives can retire some of their sanctimony, combined they might succeed in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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By the age of four, a child of professionals would have heard 32 million more words than a child on welfare. This 'thirty-million word gap' appears to have a huge impact in the child's development. 'With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children's vocabularies were growing and the higher the children's IQ test scores at age three and later,' Hart and Risley wrote. They continued to follow the children until they were nine years old and found that the number of words young children heard seemed to have a substantial impact on their brain development, IQ, and school performance. Later research has confirmed their findings, as well as their conclusion that by school age poor children are often so far behind that it is difficult for them to catch up. Moreover, many of the words low-income children heard were stern ones of scolding, while professional parents praised their children at every opportunity. Children on welfare heard two words of discouragement for every encouraging one, while children of professionals received six encouraging words for every discouraging one. As David Olds and many other researchers have found, it's not that poor families are averse to talking to their babies or to praising them...By and large, parents of every background love their kids, want them to succeed, and are happy to help them thrive. The problem is that struggling single moms living in poverty are stressed and busy, don't realize that talking to a baby is critical, and often are accustomed to a parenting style that is authoritarian.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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The broader need is not just for technical answers-a better childhood program, more micronutrients--but also for greater empathy. As long as our society sees misfortune as the just deserts of those who are lazy or immoral, we're not going to solve these problems. The flip side is that those who are successful need to understand that the root cause of their achievements isn't just hard work and innate intelligence but also luck in the lottery of birth followed by a supportive middle-class upbringing. 'Society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I have earned,' notes Warren Buffett. 'If you stuck me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later.
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Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
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There are the subsidies to the wealthy like the carried-interest tax loophole or the mortgage subsidy for yachts. By some calculations, corporate subsidies, credits, and loopholes are 50% higher than entitlements to the poor, not including medicare and medicaid.Some of the other subsidies are outlandish. Put a few goats on your golf course and you can classify it as farmland, as President Trump did, and you can save large sums in taxes. The tax code has come to serve the wealthy in myriad of ways.
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Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn
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The men want to be included; they don't want to be seen as the ennemy.
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Sheryl WuDunn (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)