Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Lena Clemente
Some say this is a lousy time to be a woman.
More than half a million women are trafficked across borders each year.
Every day, an estimated 25,000 girls are married off against their will.
And when it comes to the booming emerging markets,
40% of child marriages occur in India.
In 2008, an estimated one million girls in China were missing at birth.
In the US, more than a third of single-mother households
live below the poverty line
even if they're raising more of America's kids
than ever before.
Their unemployment rate hit 12.4% last year.
On the other hand,
some people say this is the best of time to be a woman.
In the US and Europe,
women earn almost 60% of university degrees,
40% of wives in the US now out-earn their husbands,
and researcher Liza Mundy
predicts they will be the majority within a generation.
In the booming emerging markets, women represent 60%
of the million-plus university graduates entering Brazil's labor force.
Half of the world's self-made female billionaire
are in China,
and in India, 15% of large company CEOs are women,
according to Sylvia Ann Hewlett.
So who's right?
The bad news folks or the good news folks?
The truth is they both are.
As you see,
there is a huge and growing gap between the good news and the bad.
So what separates the two? Sustained access to opportunity.
For far too long, and in too many places, both rich and poor,
suffocated opportunity is both the old tradition and the new normal.
And we all have gotten used to it and way too accepting of it.
But poverty of income does not equal poverty of imagination
and whether we want to be or not, we are all in this together.
Global growth is the central issue shaping our shared future.
And the math simply does not add up when women are left out of the equation.
Increasing the share of women with secondary education by 1%
boosts annual per capita income growth by 0.3 percentage points for years.
Women-owned businesses now account for 16% of all US jobs,
and the Food and Agriculture Organization
estimates that if women farmers
had the same access to resources as men,
we could cut the number of hungry people in this world
by up to 150 million.
So you see, these are not about women's issues,
this is about a prosperity gap and a possibility gap
that harms all of us.
Nearly half of all the available productive potential of females
is under or unutilized; nearly half.
The UN estimates that the Asia-Pacific economy alone
would gain 90 billion dollars annually if women had better access to better jobs,
and as the World Economic Forum notes,
"maximizing access to female talent is a strategic imperative for business."
Suffocated opportunity and denied ambition offer a sure route to global stagnation.
We simply do not have the luxury of wasting the talent we have,
and yet, we still are.
But for those of us who are comfortable
pulling up the ladder behind us and living in a cocoon of comfort,
we will not make us richer or safer.
Drawbridge economics will only lead us backward
and deprive us of the teachers, scientists, and engineers we need.
In India, I wrote a story about a program that paid parents
to keep their girls alive and unmarried until age 18.
And what was incredible about it
was that in the process of not marrying off their girls,
they kept them in school
and watched as they became fascinated by math and science
and began dreaming of their careers as teachers, and nurses, and doctors,
careers that would pay for their parents old age.
And that got me thinking about the three things
that really do make the difference between poverty and plenty.
First: entrepreneurship.
In Herat, Afghanistan I recently wrote a story about Roya Mahboob,
a 25-year-old girl who turned her hobby - building websites in university -
into a software company that provides solutions
for universities, and hospitals, and corporations.
She employs men and women
in a country whose unemployment rate hovers around 40%.
Each day, with the support of her father,
she braves threatening phone calls, and society disapproval,
and sometimes, night letters just to open her door and go to work.
Like Malala Yousafzai,
she is part of a young generation of homegrown role models.
Secondly, there's education, and this one is very personal to me.
My mother found herself at 28 with a five-year-old to support
and no college education to do it with.
She really believed that the only thing that would make the difference
between our constrained present and the future she wanted for me
was education,
so she lied about our address for years
so that I could go to the Maryland public school
that she thought would give me the better chance to thrive.
And then, there is investment.
Corporations, NGOs, and banks are now investing in women leaders.
Women like Helen who I met in Liberia.
She runs a waste management company
that she dreams of making the biggest one in Liberia.
She grew her profits
and puts two of her nieces and nephews through college
because she grew her ability to run her profit and loss statement
and think about how to expand into new businesses.
Corporations are also thinking about how to help women suppliers
because they see investing in women who are part of supply chain
not as some nice-to-have but as a must-do,
because women are their customers and their market.
And part of narrowing the gap
between where we are and where we could be,
lies here in this room in Washington DC with all of you.
Because another big gap we see
is the one between the rhetoric about how important women are
and the reality of how wide the wallet opens
when it comes to boosting their chances.
Words don't pay rent, or build schools, or open businesses.
And as someone who worked in finance,
I truly believe the numbers tell a story worth reading.
Just 2% of post-conflict budgets target women's empowerment.
Women's share of corporate procurement is less than 1% globally,
and women attract about 5% of venture capital.
And it's not dollars alone to tell a story;
far too often, we don't want to touch women's stories
because we see them as soft, or special interest,
or the surest path to a career cemetery,
but who are we waiting for to change that?
And how in the world can we possibly see women's stories as soft
when the work they do is so very hard?
Half the population cannot be happy with a day or a week,
and march when International Women's Day
would have to last a whole lot longer
to make the difference the global economy needs.
So talk may be cheap, but inaction will be costly
because the dividends in terms
of lives saved, and girls educated, and jobs created are enormous,
and yet there is so much good news
because while it's easy to think that the solution lies elsewhere,
the story of the power of the purse tells something very different.
According to Boston Consulting Group, women in the US control
nearly three-quarters of US household spending.
Global consumer spending by women is projected to reach 28 trillion by 2014,
and adding all the numbers up, women represent a growth market
that's bigger than China and India combined.
So you see, women are the poor
not just of the proslems but of the solutionS,
and the solutions benefit
not just women but children and men and indeed, whole societies.
So there is no time to wait for others to fill the gap.
We vote for the world we want
every single day with our wallets and our words,
and it is time for us to see our voices and our dollars as our shovels
to invest in the infrastructure that will allow women and girls to thrive.
We will never know what potential we lose
when women and girls are the world's least exploited economic resource.
And I would ask you,
what if the next Steve Jobs were married off at age 11?
Just think about what a loss that would be for all of us
because unleashing opportunity is everyone's work.
This is not about women stuff,
this is about winning a more secure future,
a richer future for everyone
at a time when the extremes of inequality threatened to topple
the very foundations upon which we are standing.
If we live in an issue ghetto, we will get nowhere.
And it is time for all of us to say enough
and to build an army of opportunity fighters
who says that no little girl
should be told it is OK to be denied an education,
no 13-year-old shall be told
she has no choice when being forced to marry a man four decades her senior,
and no woman should be told it is acceptable
when adulthood marks the graveyard for her dreams.
A lot of people in this town have talked recently
about women's ambition,
but I want to talk to you instead, about power,
because each of us has more than we think,
and you have to recognize it to exercise it.
We can invest in those who invest in girls' education,
we can support businesses that support women,
and we can see our dollars as seed capital
to support companies that share our values.
I almost didn't make it here tonight
because my husband and I were in the hospital
with our 10-week-old son,
and even as he started to get better, I thought,
"How in the world am I ever going to be here
and focus, and be with you tonight?"
And then I thought of my mom,
and the army of single moms I grew up with in PG County
just 15 minutes and about a million economic miles away
from here in Washington.
No one ever asked our mothers if they felt up to going to work
even when their kids were sick,
or their cars broke down, or our apartment flooded.
They simply got on with it because we needed them
and because no one else was going to do it if they didn't.
Counted out and dismissed by so many as undermining values,
they taught us the value of hard work, and determination, and perseverance,
and they told us it was up to us to fill the gaps we see
no matter how much else was tugging at our attention.
They believed that if they took care of one another, and sacrificed for us,
and work two and sometimes three jobs
to pay for piano lessons and soccer cleats,
and we somehow managed to fill the gap
between the world we lived in and the plenty they wanted for us,
we would understand that we had a responsibility
to acknowledge their example
when we were in rooms like this with change agents like you
who have the power to change the world,
and to change the world not just for women
but for a world that will not thrive without their contribution.
So no, we don't have it all, but we have ourselves,
and that is more than enough to make the difference for all of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)