Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

The Idea of a Husband
At a banking conference in Hong Kong, I was seated at dinner next to a brilliant young banker.
She was 37 years old and enjoying a very successful career, and she taught me many things over
dinner about current issues and trends in Asia. Then we started talking about our personal lives.
“Do you plan to have a family?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be rude: we Swedes (nowadays) like to
talk about these things. And she had no problem with my honest question. She smiled and looked
over my shoulder at the sun setting over the bay. She said, “I am thinking about children every
day.” Then she looked me straight in the eye. “It’s the idea of a husband I can’t stand.”
I try to comfort these women, to convince them that things will change. I
recently gave a lecture to 400 young women at the Asian University for
Women in Bangladesh. I told them about how and why cultures are always
transforming, how escape from extreme poverty and women’s access to
education and contraception have led to more pillow talk and fewer children.

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It was a very emotional lecture. The young women in colorful hijabs smiled
with their whole faces.
Afterward, the Afghan students wanted to tell me about their country. They
told me these changes were already slowly happening even in Afghanistan.
“Despite the war, despite the poverty,” they told me, “many of us young
people are planning a modern life. We are Afghans, we are Muslim women.
And we want a man just like you describe, a man who listens and plans
together with us, and then we want two children who go to school.”
The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African
countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim
values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those
found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress
they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.