Sheryl WuDunn
Sheryl WuDunn is a Chinese American business executive, author, and lecturer who was the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize.
A senior banker focusing on growth companies in technology, new media and the emerging markets, WuDunn also works with double bottom line firms, alternative energy issues, and women entrepreneurs. She has also been a private wealth adviser with Goldman Sachs and was previously a journalist and business executive for The New York Times. She is now senior managing director at Mid-Market Securities [1] , a boutique investment banking firm in New York serving small and medium companies.
At the Times, WuDunn ran coverage of global energy, global markets, foreign technology and foreign industry. She oversaw international business topics ranging from China's economic growth to technology in Japan, from oil and gas in Russia to alternative energy in Brazil. She was also anchor of The New York Times Page One, a nightly program of the next day's stories in the Times. She also worked in the Times's Strategic Planning Department and in the Circulation Department, where she ran the effort to build the next generation of readers for the newspaper. She was one of the few people at The Times who went back and forth between the news and business sides of the organization.
She earlier was a foreign correspondent in The New York Times Beijing and Tokyo bureaus, and speaks Chinese and Japanese. While in Asia, she also reported from other areas, including North Korea, Australia, Burma and the Philippines. WuDunn, recipient of an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College, will be a senior lecturer at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs in the fall of 2011. She is a commentator on China and global affairs on television and radio shows, including NPR, Colbert Report and Charlie Rose.
“It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work”
“When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.”
“When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.”
“The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.”
“Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.”
“Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.”