Sheryll WuDunn and the Power of Women

http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice.html

Sheryl WuDunn is a third generation Chinese American who grew up in New York City. After graduating from Cornell with a Bachelor’s in European History, she went on to earn her MBS from Harvard and an MPA from Princeton. She married reporter Nicholas Kristoff and eventually worked for The New York Times. She and her husband have been correspondents in China and have co-written books, including the one mentioned in the TED Talk, Half the Sky. She is a senior banker and is largely involved with working with women entrepreneurs and working along the lines of alternative energy issues. While working for The New York Times, she reported from North Korea, Australia, Burma, Beijing, Tokyo, and the Philippines. She has been recognized multiple times with prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize (which made her and her husband the first married couple to ever receive the Pulitzer for journalism along with making her the first Asian American to claim the Pulitzer Prize), the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and being listed by Newsweek as one of the 150 Women who “Shake the World.”

In the TED talk, she spoke about the two tenets presented in her most recent novel. The first tenet is that of gender inequity. She presented several different surprising facts. For instance, in the Western World, where men and women are equally provided with relatively stable health care and food, there are more women, and they live longer. However, in other parts of the world, demographers have shown that anywhere from 60 to 100 million females are missing in the current population. This is a result of several different things. In some places, female fetuses are aborted after seeing the gender in sonograms. And more scarily, in the last half-century, more females were discriminated to death than all the people killed in battlefields during the 20^th century.

The second tenet of her book and of the TED talk subject is that by providing women with education and access to the labor force, the terrible cycle of poverty and of oppression can stop. What she explains is that women should no longer be considered a problem in cultures but rather looked at as solutions. She quoted Bill Gates to have explained to a gender separated crowd in Saudi Arabia that further technological advance would be impossible if “half of the resources weren’t being utilized.” Sheryl then went on to relay several stories of different females across the globe that were able to transition into a more virtuous cycle but also beneficially affect their environments as well. In these stories, some women took amounts of mere 65 to 130 dollars and changed their entire lives along with the lives of those around them. The TED talk then ended with the idea that we as the audience have scored on the lottery of life. And while being able to afford the basic essentials, there are few things that can actually permanently elevate our happiness. One of such things is that of contributing to a cause larger than ourselves to benefit others indefinitely. Thus, it becomes our responsibility not only to attain stability for ourselves but to also later on help stabilize others.

In a matter of months, I will be attending Santa Clara University. When people ask me about my major, I can most often muster enough will power to say, “Undeclared.” But that’s exactly what I am. I’ve been undecided about the entire idea of what my future is for a good majority of my life. It’s most often come down to medicine or law which are two things relatively separated on the spectrum of career. That is, unless I reform health care or something ridiculously phenomenal. However, reflecting on all of it, it ultimately comes down to whether or not I’ll be able to help people benefit from my profession. With my want and need to continuously help the Philippines develop, I’ve constantly debated whether or not my path of choice at the moment was good …because in the end, if I, myself, cannot succeed, how on earth could I possibly help others? But that also comes with the question and debate of what wealth I’d measure myself in. Money? Smiles? Fed children? Happiness? It’s like what Sheryl WuDunn said in the TED Talk. Once we’re stable individual units, we should seek to stabilize the entire unit through our actions. That would not only bring us happiness but everyone else as well. While visiting Boston University, the Dean had an open conversation with us about what we would measure happiness in. GDP? How many songs we sang each day? How many poems we wrote down in our Moleskins? Or how sure we were that everyone in the country had a bed to sleep in at night? I can’t give the equation for what would give me ultimate happiness. There are so many questions that I honestly cannot possibly give a definite answer to right now.

"Sometimes our expectations are betrayed by the numbers, variables are impossible to assign a rational value." Brownie points if anybody knows the movie reference. But I didn’t expect to end up at Santa Clara University. In truth, it was far away from my first choice. But when it came down to it, the idea of being practical and possibly benefiting my little brother’s education with a full ride at a really good college was something I couldn’t turn down. Not even for a school that I was in love with like BU. But who knows, maybe all that saved up money can go to grad school for me later on. And maybe one day I’ll be able to sing that Augustana song loudly in my car knowing that when “she says I think I’ll go to Boston,” it’ll be true. But maybe that time around, it’ll actually be Cambridge and an itty bitty school called Harvard. I’m actually really ambitious…along with being really indecisive ;)