Killed for being female?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2014
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are 100 million women missing from the world? A listener asks More or Less to explore this powerful statement - "More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century." The quote is from a book called 'Half the Sky' by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It has been used in articles, by UN agencies and on TV to highlight the fatal consequences of discrimination of women based on their sex. But is it true? More or Less looks at the evidence. How can we know if a woman is killed precisely because she is a woman? And how do we know how many men have been killed in war?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
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| 0:36.0 | This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
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| 0:45.0 | For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
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| 0:51.0 | slash podcasts. |
| 0:56.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:59.6 | I'm Ruth Alexander and this week we'll be exploring which is the biggest killer, war or misogyny. |
| 1:07.0 | Recently on his show American TV chat host Bill Maher quoted from journalist Nicholas Christoph's book |
| 1:16.9 | half the sky. He said this and I quoted it then but it probably bears repeating every |
| 1:22.1 | week he said more girls were killed in the |
| 1:24.5 | last 50 years precisely because they were girls then men were killed in all the |
| 1:30.6 | wars of the 20th century. |
| 1:33.0 | Yeah, I mean you hear that reaction. |
| 1:35.0 | I think people just don't understand how deep this problem is. |
| 1:38.0 | One of our loyal listeners from India was watching this and she was surprised. She got in touch |
| 1:44.3 | with us to see if we would investigate. |
... |
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