Between 60 million and 107 million women and girls are missing around the world – according to studies quoted by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their shocking, yet remarkably hopeful, lead article, Saving the World’s Women, about the oppression of women worldwide in the August 23, 2009 New York Times Magazine.  These studies compare normal ratios of births against the current population.  In China, for example, there are 107 males for every 100 females and India has 108.  Women and girls around the world vanish for a multitude of reasons: lack of health care, gender-selective abortions, maternal mortality, forced labor, sexual servitude, and murder.   

While the data is bleak, there is a unifying theme of resilience among the women whose stories are featured in Kristof and WuDunn’s article.  These women escaped statistical obscurity and reclaimed their lives, largely through education and the ability to achieve economic independence.  

What may be counterintuitive about the data on missing women and girls is that bias against girls remains profound in rich and highly developed areas in India and China.  In a companion NYT Magazine article, The Daughter Deficit, Tina Rosenberg posits that the two factors policymakers count on to mitigate such selective brutality -- development and focusing aid on women -- cannot overpower a deep-seated patriarchal culture which confers power, security and authority to those who have sons and is sometimes used in service of this culture with tragic results.  Ms. Rosenberg says that the bias against girls applies in highly developed nations in the world, including South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. 

This statement about patriarchal cultural norms in Taiwan, does not, however, match my own reality.  I am the only child of Taiwanese immigrants – who pushed me hard to succeed, like most other Asian-American parents, and never let me doubt that gender equality was a universal human right.   My mom wanted a girl and she got one.  I asked my mom what freed her from subscribing to a son-centered culture – and she attributed it to the liberal education she received at her Presbyterian boarding school in Taiwan and her parents’ open minds.   

As it turns out, my mom also was one of the first working moms in our middle-middle class neighborhood in Pennsylvania, getting some grief because I was a latch-key kid.  One of our next door neighbors was the next woman to work.   She got a job and soon found the gumption to leave her abusive husband.  Next was a neighbor who lived across the street.  Her husband, a bit of a cad and stung by her success, left the family.  Raising three sons on her own, she continued to flourish as a state government employee and ran a successful race for township supervisor.  In that family, like the others, the patriarchal cultural norms have been neutralized.   Economic capacity and self-determination certainly can be a great equalizer. 

While all of these “success stories” are anecdotal, the theme of economic independence and gender equality resonates through all of them.   It’s not much of a logical leap to apply these lessons across the world; as Secretary Clinton reports, the World Bank and other analysts have found that where women are mistreated and denied equal rights, we have the instability that very often serves as an incubator of extremism.

Driving societies toward gender equality -- legally, economically and culturally -- might just be the key to a safer world for both women and men.