Meeting Global Challenges: Healthy Women, Healthy World
IWHC's Fourth Annual Gala
January 11, 2005

Introduction by IWHC Board Chair Kati Marton

What an honor it is to be honoring our colleague Nick. We've already heard from some truly remarkable women tonight, and now we're going to hear from a truly remarkable man.

Since 2001, Nick Kristof has used his column in the New York Times to make women's challenges heartstoppingly real. He's written of women and young girls in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and across sub-Saharan Africa, of the women of Darfur and Baghdad.  And he doesn't write about them from the comfort of his office in New York, but he writes about them from their villages, and their refugee camps, and he lives their lives with them. He's an extraordinary reporter. 

He's one of the very few journalists today who are telling these stories about women fearlessly and honestly, and not only that, he actually demands action. He's focused our attention on millions of women who don't have access to the health care that they need, and therefore, of course, he's won the abiding affection of the Coalition.

We're pleased to recognize Nick for his work on behalf of all the women of the world, and I want to just say a few words about Nick's wonderful wife, Sheryl WuDunn, who's also with us tonight, and they happen to be the only couple who has ever shared a Pulitzer Prize. Sheryl and Nick won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Tiananmen story in Beijing, and I believe that each, on their own, also has a George Polk Award and the Overseas Club Award of America. So, Nick, if you could come up please, so we can recognize you for your persuasive and passionate commitment to women's rights. Long may you write…

Remarks by Nicholas Kristof

Well, thank you very, very much. I originally was supposed to be in Cambodia today, but I delayed that trip to Cambodia until tomorrow morning, and I'm so much happier being here than Cambodia. Now, I don't want to oppress your own human rights by speaking on and dragging on this evening, but people periodically ask me, Whence your interest in women in the developing world? And you know, I think it originated…well, part of it undoubtedly is Sheryl's tutelage. She's the best editor at the New York Times.

Nicholas Kristof addressing the crowd.

But the other aspect of it was that in 1989 we were covering the Tiananmen unrest, and of course it was a major story all over the world. Now, our estimate was that about 500 people died in the suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations, and it was obviously a hugely important story for China and the world. But then, we began to find that there were a lot of Chinese women who'd bee abducted and sold to villagers in the countryside, and we tried to get a handle on how many were involved, and we found it was about 700,000. 

Meanwhile, we found that every year in China, 30,000 Chinese girls under the age of 5 died because they didn't have access to food or health care. And everywhere you looked, the scale of the problem of the gender gap in the developing world was so enormous, and so dwarfed other human rights issues that we were much more attuned to, that I came to see it, and I've periodically described it as, the major moral challenge that we face in the world today, akin to the way slavery was the preeminent moral challenge of the 19th century, or the struggle against the various ideological "isms" and totalitarianism was in the 20th century. In the same way, the paramount moral challenge of this century is going to be that attempt to address the gender gap in the developing world, and you folks are doing that. 

The other aspect of it, I think, is simply that there are so many problems that are deeply intractable around the world, and it's very hard to register progress against them. And this is one where, in contrast, there has been a good deal of progress. For example, we know that every year about 585,000 women die in childbirth around the globe, one every 30 seconds. And, in fact, where countries have tried to reduce maternal mortality, they've registered enormous progress. Probably with modest effort, and modest sustained effort, we could save 200,000 of those lives a year. So you have a combination of scale of a problem and an ability to actually make considerable progress on those. So, thank you very much for honoring me today, and my compliments to all of you on your great work. Thank you.

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