Half the Sky Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Guides to Giving - How to find the right charity and our BookBrowse Review of Half the Sky.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

About This Guide
The questions and topics that follow are intended to enhance your group's conversation about Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's enlightening and inspiring book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

About This Book

The questions and topics that follow are intended to enhance your group's conversation about Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's enlightening and inspiring book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.


Reader's Guide

1. "It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century" (p. xvii). Why is the dire state of women in impoverished cultures, as set out by the authors in the introduction, also a great opportunity for them?      
2. "The modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (p. 11).  Given the scale of the problem, what do Kristof and WuDunn suggest as reasonable efforts towards ending human trafficking?
3. What do the stories about Srey Momm and Srey Neth indicate about the complexities of the trafficking problem in places like Thailand and Cambodia? Why do Kristof and WuDunn say "it's most productive to focus efforts on prevention and putting brothels out of business" (p. 45)?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Anchor Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.