The girl enters the studio stage left, and the crowd goes
wild. She is dressed in traditional Pakistani garb, poised, smiling, and
impossibly mature. The next 16 minutes make you alternately want to cry,
scream, cheer, and laugh. In an interview destined to go
viral, Malala Yousafzai left host Jon Stewart speechless with her
beyond-her-years wisdom and eloquence. In the past few weeks, Malala’s name –
and her cause – have been inescapable, especially after she became the youngest
person ever on the short list for a Nobel Peace Prize. She has met the Queen of
England, taken tea with Angelina Jolie, had a biography published about her
life (at 16, no less), and put a face on the struggle to educate girls,
especially in the developing world.
It is striking that at only 16, Malala has achieved global
celebrity not even Hollywood starlets could dream of, and all without a stint
in rehab. In a documentary about the Taliban in Swat Valley, the viewer is
offered a glimpse of Malala just a few years ago: markedly shier, she hides her
face behind her hands as she cries on camera. The reason for her tears: the
next day, a Taliban ban on girls in school will take effect, and her schooldays
would come to a (brief) end. Her father smiles and pats her back, telling the
cameraman that he simply could not risk his daughter’s life because he “fell in
love with her” the moment she was born. Four years later, Malala says of the
moment, “We don’t learn the importance of anything until it’s snatched from our
hands… Education is power for women, and that is why the terrorists are scared
of education.”
Malala is the perfect precocious, intelligent, mature
teenager to serve as the poster girl for female education, and the movement has
been receiving newfound and much-needed attention of late. Female education is
one of those issues that seems like no-brainer to me: not only does it empower
females, but it spurs the economy, leads to improvements in family and child
health, decreases birthrates in already overpopulated countries, and all-around
makes society better. Yet it is also one of the most contentious, with Islamist
extremists in Malala’s Swat Valley claiming it is against Islam and blowing up
more than 400 schools in the last half decade. In Pakistan, only 45
percent of women are literate compared to 69 percent of men. In neighboring
Afghanistan, these numbers drop to 12.6 percent for women and 43.1 percent for
men. Worldwide, 79.7 percent of women are literate while 88.6 percent of men
are. Although both genders could clearly benefit from greater access to
education, the discrepancies in their literacy rates points to the obvious
greater disadvantages faced by women.
Female literacy rates and access to education also points to
the larger “War on Women” that is taking place outside the US sphere of
domestic politics (although that certainly exists as well) and is leading to
not only asymmetric opportunities, but also the deadly phenomenon of
Gendercide. The fact that females are viewed as not worth of education harkens
to a larger issue: in many places, female infants are not even viewed as worthy
of life. As a friend of mine recently pointed out on the international Day of
the Girl, more than 200 million women are missing in Asia alone. The
affordability and proliferation of sex determination tests for pregnant women
has only served to speed up this trend. This Gendercide has killed more human
beings than all of the wars of the twentieth century combined. If you take on
single decade from 1900 onwards, then the amount of girls killed in those ten
years surpasses all of the people killed in all of the recognized genocides of
the 20th century combined.
The worth of a girl’s life in places where the issue is most
acute amounts to less than nothing. In a haunting scene from the documentary It’s a Girl (the three deadliest words
in the world), a woman recounts how she has murdered eight of her own female
infants as soon as they were born, for the simple crime of being a girl. The
most disturbing part is her facial expression as she admits this: she does not
cry, or get upset, but actually smiles and laughs as she recounts her
daughters’ deaths at her hands. You can only hope that it is a defense
mechanism.
In places like China and northern India today, the birthrate
is 120 boys for every 100 girls. Anyone who’s made it through a basic lesson in
probability can see that this number is extremely skewed by human intervention.
While there are many steps that policymakers can take to ensure that baby girls
are not aborted or murdered after birth, one of the most concrete is improved
access to female education. In many cultures, the decision to practice
gendercide is an economic one: females are a financial burden unlikely to ever
contribute back to their families. Yet if these same females were offered the
same educational opportunities as their brothers, and if they are able to turn
this education into careers or at least income-augmenting activities, then part
of the cultural stigma of having a girl is lifted.
Part of the reason Malala Yousafzai is so bewitching is her
dedication. Not many 16-year-olds would survive being shot in the head and
think, “Now I’m going to go continue doing what got me shot in the first place,
but on a global scale.” Another reason is her sense of pacifism, perfectly
expressed on The Daily Show when she says she wants education even for the
children of the Taliban who seek to kill her. Her own father offers an example
of a man who not only educates his daughter, but seems to cherish her just as
much as his male children. Women cannot win this fight without the support of
men like Mr. Yousafzai, much like gay rights will never be achieved without a
cadre of straight allies. In the words of Malala, “You must fight others, but
through peace, and through dialogue, and through education.” Here’s to hoping
that in our lifetimes, this is a fight we can win.
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