Next week the new book Half the Sky, on the plight and progress of the world’s women, will be released. Last spring I had the privilege of hearing the journalist power couple coauthors Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn talk about some of amazing women whose stories are in the book. The image with this post is from last weekend’s New York Times Magazine article by Kristoff and WuDunn. In the photo are Saima Muhammad, shown with her daughter Javaria (seated), who lives near Lahore, Pakistan. She was routinely beaten by her husband until she started a successful embroidery business.
I have pre-ordered Half the Sky — whose title is based on a Chinese saying that “women hold up half the sky.” Perhaps the authors have mentioned mobile as they look to the future for the situations where women have been isolated and confined. Let’s think about that a bit here.
Imagine what it would mean to each of the women in the photo above to have a smart phone that accesses the internet tucked away in a pocket. One or more of them already may. I would bet that Saima uses at the least a personal cellphone in her embroidery business. In Jump Point, Tom Hayes predicts that by 2011 there will be 3 billion people individually connected into the internet. Let’s guess that by 2015 a couple of billion more will be added. By then the world’s population will be past 7 billion, they say. Far more than half the population will carry with them a mobile connection to what Hayes calls the network culture. Do the math: most women will have a mobile connected to the internet.
Mobiles will be ubiquitous before another generation of baby girls grow up. Cries for help will reach not just within earshot, but around the world. Girls once forbidden to go to school will carry with them direct access to anything they want to learn. Women will be connected with commerce and possess a tool of entrepreneurial equality — male brawn balanced by female e-connectivity. It can take generations for attitude change to evolve, but the trap of isolation transforms into open sky immediately when she slips a mobile device into her pocket.
