(picture from NYTimes magazine article, “Saving the World’s Women”)
You may have seen Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn’s new book, Half the Sky, or the NY times article about Saving the World’s Women.
Why should we focus on women and women’s issues?
Why would donors give to causes that support women?
This audio interview with founder of Women Moving Millions, Chris Grumm, a Texas native, talks about why funding women is just good for our world.
Why make an entire nonprofit about getting women to give million dollar gifts? You can read the New York Times article, or listen to Chris Grumm reveals the answers to this and more in her interview. Download it as an mp3 or listen here.
Kristof and WuDunn write, “Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation.
“…We came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study…(that) found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.
A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.
Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. “More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today.” -NY Times Magazine, August 17, 2009
Why Fund Women? Why now?
Chris Grumm writes, “There’s no shortage of sobering statistics that present a strong moral case for funding women – for example, women produce nearly 80% of the world’s food, but receive less than 10% of agricultural assistance, and a staggering 70% of those living in abject poverty are women.”
It’s not just good fundraising, it’s good business. The business case for funding women is well documented. “Forget China, India and the internet: economic growth is driven by women.”-The Economist
For the first time in history, women are funding women in greater numbers and in millions of dollars. As novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe once said: “Women are the real architects of society.” Let’s continue to shift economic power into the hands of the builders – fund women first.
If you are a woman, there is no better time to become a fundraiser for women.
If you are a man, there is no better time to become a fundraiser for women.
What are some of your ideas for how we can help women fund women?
How would you package your fundraising materials differently?
What would be some fundraising events you would throw for women?