
What’s So Scary About Smart Girls? - kareemm
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/kristof-whats-so-scary-about-smart-girls.html?smid=fb-share&smv2&_r=0
======
smnrchrds
> Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them,
> so both remain mired in the past.

Any article that compares Iran and Saudi Arabia like this is a naive over-
generalization. I'm not sure what the author means by empowerment, but Iran is
much closer to US in terms of gender equality than Saudi Arabia.

In Iran, 12-year education is mandatory for both genders. There are more
female university graduates than male (around 60%), although much like US,
fewer pursue engineering degrees[1]. More than half of medical students are
female.

Yes, girls are discriminated against in labor market. There are less likely to
get a job if there is a similarly-qualified or slightly less-qualified male
candidate and will probably earn less than their male counterparts, but don't
you have the same problem in your country?

I hope you understand why I hate it when someone puts the name of my country
in the same sentence as Saudi Arabia, where they sentenced a woman to flogging
because she dared to drive[2].

[1] I don't have any statistics, but in my university, 25-30% engineering
students were female. There were less girls in traditionally male-dominated
majors like civil engineering, compared to computer and electrical
engineering. Also, the majority of Chemistry students were female.

[2] [http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/flogging-
sentence...](http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/flogging-sentence-
saudi-arabian-woman-after-driving-beggars-belief-2011-09-27-0)

~~~
sliverstorm
_in my university, 25-30% engineering students were female_

You're doing better than the USA by, what, an order of magnitude in this
regard.

~~~
Wintamute
An "order of magnitude" generally means a difference resulting from
multiplying by 10, i.e. 10% vs 100%.

~~~
danellis
Or 3% vs 30%...

~~~
Wintamute
Yes but the real figure in the US isn't 3% is it? That was my point -.-

------
QuantumChaos
The article tries to fit this event into a narrative about oppression of
women, and women's education. And yet Boko Haram are against education in
general, and in a previous attack on a school, killed 59 school boys, while
letting the girls go.

[1] [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/boko-
haram-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/boko-haram-
dontkillourboys.html)

~~~
tsotha
Yep. The entire basis of the article is built upon a false premise.

------
nhaehnle
The article reminds us of some very good points about our relationships with
developing countries. Education does so much more for spreading democracy than
drones do, but our monetary priorities don't reflect this, unfortunately.

I stumbled in the last paragraph:

 _It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States
are trafficked into commercial sex each year._

What does that mean? With on the order of 5 million births per year (both boys
and girls), that would imply 4% of all women are affected. That seems a bit on
the high end. Does anybody know what's going on here in terms of statistics?

~~~
DanBC
"Trafficked" has different meanings.

Some places (the UK) it includes:

* women who voluntarily travel from one country to England for sex work and who have assistance to do so

* women working as sex workers who are assisted to travel within the uk

* all the other more troubling definitions that include coercion and violence

~~~
tsotha
So basically they included a bunch of voluntary stuff to plump up the
statistic?

~~~
gadders
Yeah. It's a charity. Nobody funds charities that aren't scaring people with
statistics.

~~~
waterhouse
I'm not sure how many layers of sarcasm are in that last statement. ;-) But
really, that would be a great thing to know for sure: Whether certain kinds of
dishonesty are useful in charitable campaigns. If we had studies proving it
was counterproductive overall, then we could confidently and on principle
criticize and discourage that behavior. If they proved the opposite, ... I
would sigh, let others do that for my causes, and not work _too_ hard to
discourage them.

Has anyone made serious attempts to study this sort of thing? I know there
have been some A/B tests on charity pitches that other people've cited. For
this... ideally you'd like to compare the long-run success of a charity, but
that'd probably be too hard. Studying specific fundraising drives with
specific end dates seems more doable and might turn up something useful.

It probably would contaminate the results if you had the same charity putting
out an honest and a dishonest message that would both reach the same audience,
'cause I think a failure mode of dishonest messages is someone loudly
disproving it and denouncing the organization, which would probably hurt both
messages. So you might want a lot of charities... or a nationwide charity
doing local campaigns in several different states, and assign them randomly to
the honest or dishonest message. And then there's plausibility, and other
kinds of effectiveness... you may have to try a lot of messages, or make an
honest/dishonest pair with a very small change (e.g. just the number).
Probably difficult... but I'd be interested to see someone do it.

~~~
gadders
I'd rather they just told the truth. Lying for a good cause is still lying.

Also, it would make it hard to choose between competing charities for finite
amounds of funding. Would you fund the most serious issue, or the biggest
liar?

~~~
waterhouse
> _I 'd rather they just told the truth. Lying for a good cause is still
> lying._

I'm with you on that.

As for the rest: Do you mean, if you as a donator have seen through the lie,
which should you donate to? Oh, I see, you're saying that liars might
successfully get people to donate to them when otherwise they would have given
the money to a more important cause. Yes, that's a problem. It's just that,
well, people tend to think their cause is the most important in the world, and
that siphoning money away from other causes for dishonest reasons is not a
problem. [Well, for many causes you probably couldn't fool yourself into
thinking that, but it seems distressingly common.] Charities who do this may
be considered "selfish". It seems the irony doesn't always bother them.

If we could tell those people "You idiots, you are _hurting your cause_ by
lying and I can prove it", then that would give them a selfish reason to stop,
which seems it might work. Get them to stop, or if they don't, get the
reasonable-minded others in their organization to kick them out or leave. It
would be nice if they stopped for the right reasons, but if they did it for
this reason, that'd still be an improvement.

------
waterhouse
[pedantry alert] The headline made me think the article was going to describe
the sexual/romantic tastes of some apparently important subset of heterosexual
men. Or maybe the behavior of some set of boys probably in high school who are
intimidated by smart girls in their classes. I wonder to what extent this is
intentional... Meanwhile, the article talks only about educated girls, not
mentioning the word "smart" outside the title, and there is a case to be made
that "smart" and "educated" are, though correlated, distinct attributes. One
could thus make a case that the headline is _wrong_ , most likely for
attention-grabbing purposes. Sigh. [end of pedantry alert]

That aside, let's see. _" Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education?
Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society."_ Indeed. _"
What saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight
militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in
the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy."_ I
wonder if this has anything to do with what a powerful tool control of the
educational system is. For example, look at what the North Korean government
is able to achieve through that means. Are the Western governments exhibiting
some kind of restraint here? Is it just that they haven't really bothered? Is
giving "aid" more difficult politically than beefing up the military? Or is it
that serious funding of education would lead to fights about who gets to
control it? I am ignorant of such matters, so I'll shut up now.

------
chroma
It's interesting to see one commonality not mentioned by both the article and
(so far) commenters.

Boko Haram, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, and Iran differ in almost every way one
can compare: wealth, nationality, race, language, political views, and more.
But they do share one thing besides the oppression of women. Have you guessed
it yet?

There are no Taoists throwing acid in the faces of women. There are no
Buddhists massacring students. There are no Hindu dictatorships refusing to
let women drive, or decreeing their testimony to be worth half that of a man's
_even in the case of rape_. No Zoroastrian state punishes thieves with
amputation. Some of these religions have had their share of atrocities in the
past, but they are rather tame now. Many of them have adherents who are
ignorant, poor, and oppressed (especially the Tibetan Buddhists), but the
doctrines and traditions surrounding them seem less prone to cause violence
and unnecessary suffering than a book endorsed by every group mentioned in the
article.

I truly wish it were otherwise.

~~~
vorador
I'm glad you asked this question. The answer is probably not the one you're
expecting though. Boko Haram, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia all share the same
islamic doctrine: wahabism. Basically, Saudi Arabia bankrolled the spread of
wahabism in the world in a bet to increase its influence. Iran is something
else altogether, and I think that will see a lot more progress in the coming
years.

Everything is more complex than it appears initially.

One last thing.

 _There are no Buddhists massacring students._

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-dozens-of-rohingya-muslims-
ma...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-dozens-of-rohingya-muslims-massacred-by-
buddhists-in-rakhine-burma/)

~~~
chroma
Thank you for the counterexample. It sounds like you know more about this
subject than I do. I was actually hesitant to mention Buddhism, since it was
partially responsible for the kamikaze and other horrific acts.

Still, it does seem that different religions inspire different practices when
it comes to violence and human rights. Parts of Islam (specifically Wahhabism
and Salafism) are particularly bad these days. The US certainly hasn't helped
the situation, but getting attacked by Predator drones is no reason to stone
adulterers to death.

Lastly, I feel bad after commenting on this article. I don't think this
article has much to contribute to HN, nor do I think HN will contribute much
to the dialogue. Sexism + politics is a mix that few can discuss with
civility. Now I've injected religion into the mix. I apologize.

~~~
Klapaucius
"I was actually hesitant to mention Buddhism, since it was partially
responsible for the kamikaze and other horrific acts."

Kamikaze has nothing to do with buddhism whatsoever. If you want to stick it
to a religion, it would have to be shintoism, an animistic, purely Japanese
religion.

------
a-saleh
Reminded me of documentary Solar Mamas:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs)

It is about program in Jordan to educate mothers in the poorest regions in
basic electrical engineering to allow them to assembly and repair basic solar
powered utensils. (Mostly panel->power adapter->battery->light)

The most interesting question for me in the film was "Why don't you educate
men as well?" with answer along the lines "Any man from here with any
marketable skill would run abroad, from his family, mothers will want to do
something to feed their children".

Then there was the scene, where husband of one of the women in the program
tried to force her back home and abandon the "solar" school.

I wonder if we could change that attitude about educating women in men like
these ...

~~~
ars
Yah, that organization is extremely misandristic

[http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/barefoot-college-
bu...](http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/barefoot-college-bunker-roy/)

A choice quote:

"First we declared that men were untrainable. Men are restless, men are
compulsively mobile, men are ambitious, and they all want a certificate to
show for their efforts. And the moment you give one of them a certificate, he
leaves the village looking for a job in the city."

....

"Because the moment you give a woman a certificate, like a man, she’ll see it
as a passport for leaving rural areas and going to urban areas to find a job."

So basically like a person? And men and women are the same in this regard? But
said that way you have no opportunity to bash men.

Any organization that tries to destroy the concept of a family unit in the
name of education is not a good organization in my book. They seem to be one
of the worst of the bunch. Especially since the actual "education" they give
is all but worthless - they teach basically nothing, and make the poor women
think they have been educated.

------
facepalm
Yes, boys are worthless. The reason the article cites for educating girls is
that then they'll have fewer kids, especially fewer boys who could end up
making trouble.

And frankly the specific organizations for sending girls to school make me
feel uneasy. I hope similar organizations exist for boys? I am sure there are
lots of bright boys in the world who also can't afford an education. Why make
it gender specific? Why not just sponsor kids education, irrespective of
gender?

I could imagine in some countries it is more difficult to send girls to school
than boys. But a "send kids to school" organization could simply spend more
effort there to send the girls to school. No need to make a "girls education"
organization.

~~~
seanccox
There is a need for "girls education" organizations. How else do you propose
humanity overcome the statistically significant difference between the number
of girls being educated and the number of boys?

Girls aren't getting special treatment, they are being singled out for
specific support to overcome patriarchy(ies) that would keep them
undereducated, isolated, and disenfranchised from power. That isn't an issue
that a "send kids to school" organization would be addressing.

~~~
facepalm
I don't think those patriarchy issues or whatever are any consolidation for a
boy who can't afford to go to school. Why does he deserve less help than a
girl? It's not his fault if fewer girls are being educated.

------
tzs
Duplicate from Sunday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728945)

------
Dewie
Feb. 25. 2014: Federal Government College attack: Fury at military over Yobe
deaths. At least 29 teenage boys dead at Federal Government College Buni Yadi.

Boko Haram doesn't only target education for _girls_. Though that is how the
media seem to want to present it.

~~~
slowmotiony
The media didn't give a shit when they were burning boys alive.

~~~
McGuffin
Stop kidding yourself, because neither did you.

~~~
elnate
How could I? I didn't know.

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hellbreakslose
There is that saying for that:

behind every great/successful man there stands a woman :)

------
crystalmace
Very good story.

