I don't often think of Donald Trump, but his daughter is very smart. She's a woman working in real estate, which is predominantly men, and she's both savvy and articulate about her business and her business acumen.
The draconian prohibitions of the Taliban years and the gains Afghan women have achieved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 are now well known and often cited: Today, Afghans lucky enough to live in secure regions can go to school, women may work in offices, and the burqa is no longer mandatory.
It is high time to declare an end to the breastfeeding dictatorship that is drowning women in guilt and worry just when they most need support: after the birth of a child.
When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.
Numerically speaking, half the population cannot be a minority. Yet when it comes to women, the numbers plainly show that the mathematically impossible is the socially acceptable.
Microfinance does not require previous experience or loans to the same extent as a small-business loan, so it's easier for women to enter the micro sector.
We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected.
Women in Afghanistan do not ask the United States to stay for the simple or sentimental reason of safeguarding their rights. They are the first ones to say that this is not enough of a reason for the world's remaining superpower to remain in their country.
Educating girls just one year beyond the average fourth grade education increases their eventual earnings by 10 to 20 percent. Every additional year of secondary education can increase future wages by 15 to 25 percent.
War reporters are often seen as a wild bunch of thrill-seekers who wade into danger zones simply for the sake of the adrenalin high the settings inevitably provide. But this one-dimensional explanation leaves out the core of the story, which is that reporters go to these places because they feel the tug of responsibility.
In Tunisia, where women have long enjoyed greater rights than many of their Arab neighbors, women pushed for and won a new electoral code that guarantees women will make up half of a candidates' list for office.
