Now You Know How Hopeless It Really Is

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

So far history has shown us that when a profession admits women in large numbers that profession is no longer worthy. It wasn't an accident that when Nixon started dismantling our terrific health care system the medical schools finally opened to women in large numbers. Women are now the majority in law school enrollments, and we know just how broken our legal system is as well.

So when economists start going around saying "Women and girls are the solution" to the mess we're in globally, you KNOW just how hopeless things really are.

Also, when the mess is so big, of course we are going to have the females clean it up, coz yanno, the menz just aren't able to clean properly. Their thumbs aren't in the right place or something. Besides they have to, um, do Other Stuff.

Bitter? Cynical? Moi?

This week's New York Times Sunday Magazine is all about this.