i'm fareed zakaria. we have a terrific show today, filled with some of the most interesting thinkers in their fields. first up, a new way to think about the role of women in the world with a terrific important panel. then a first for gps, i will have a robot as a guest. you will want to meet my new friend data. next, a man who made me think differently about innovation. the world renowned architect, frank gehry who designs buildings like you've never seen before. how do you capture the essence of a world leader? i'll talk to the acclaimed and innovative photographer platon. finally, think you can't sell chopsticks to china? think again. first here is my take. these are the dog days of summer. in this hot sweltering weather most americans are busy working. i know i know not you folks in the hamp tons, but the others. meanwhile, most europeans are busy vacations. thus it has ever been, only it's getting worse. nowadays the average european gets about three times as many days of paid vacation as his counterpart in america. italy has the most with the average worker there getting 42 paid days off according to the world tourism organization. next was france with 37 days, germany with 35, brazil at 34, the uk at 28, canada 26, korea and japan both with 25. the united states was near the bottom of the list with the average worker getting 13 paid days off. why do we do this to ourselves? the conventioned answer is this attitude towards work makes the american economy the envy of the world. america is a hectic turbo charged system that builds, destroys, rebuilds all at warp speed. it's what created the information revolution, silicone valley, biotechnology and so on. no time for lollying at the beach. it's not clear at all that working for a few extra weeks in the summer is what makes a nation's economy hum. take a look at these numbers from ipsis a consulting firm on the percentage of citizens that actually use all their vacation days. the french lead the pack. 89% take all their days. 75% of the germans and their economy is strong, take their allotted days. 70% of indonesians use all their days, but only 57% of americans take advantage of their days. we have fewer paid vacation days than almost any other major country. even with those just 13 days off, only 57% of americans take them all. to remind you again, 89% of the french use all their days off. if you're worried that working less will mean america lags behind, don't worry. america's growth historically has been fueled mostly by investment, education, productivity, innovation and immigration. the one thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with america's growth rate is a brutal work schedule. after all, we were working hard during the very slow years of the 1970s. we're working hard now. in fact, some experts believe that working harder might actually depress productivity numbers because the additional showers worked rarely generate strong out put. we are not as productive at 8:00 p.m. as we are at 9:00 a.m. so take a break. go to the beach. read a book. watch tv. wait a minute. you're already watching tv. so well done. let's get started. i wants to spend a little time today talking about an absolutely crucial issue, the role of women in the world. one of the most important indicators, for example, of how the revolutions in the middle east will go is how well they will treat women. throughout the arab world and in africa, women remain second class citizens beholding for life to a male relative. is this changing? how fast? what else is happening with women in the world? we brought together a terrific panel to talk about this issue. let's turn to "new york times" columnist nicholas kristoff who with his wife, the journalist sheryl wudunn together wrote "half the sky" ch one of the great stories of that book is of zainab salbi from women for women international. how much of the treatment of women is culture? how much is religion and how much of it is islam in particular? >> there's no question that organized religions in general tended to take a social hierarchy that typically had men very much in top and sank phied it, client of placed the stamp of god on top of it. this is true of a number of religions. on the other hand, if you look around the world, the places where women are most likely to run into terrible problems are predominantly muslim countries. my own take is that has much less to do with the koran and islam as such as rather more to do with culture and that the insecurity, the violence, the social conflict has less to do with the koran and rather more to do with a cycle of not educating girls, marginalizing women which leads to very high birth rates which leads to a very high demographic cohort of young people age 15 to 24 which is the most destabilizing thing a country can have. the way out of that is to educate girls. the reason that bangladesh is so different from pakistan today, even though they started as one country in part is that bangladesh has done a superb job educating girls and now has more girls in high school than boys. >> and both countries are 99% muslim. >> both are muslim countries, and they read the same koran, but pakistan is a real mess and bangladesh is not. >> what about china? to me when you hear about the treatment of women, if you go back 100 years in china, women's feet were bound which people have to understand that basically meant you were breaking the feet of every woman -- >> absolutely. 100 years ago china was probably the worst place on earth to be born female. my grandmother's feet were bound. what gives me an extreme amount of hope is that in one generation that was eradicated. this is a centuries-old practice. that's because they had people inside and outside china who were foreign missionaries who thought this was horrendous. they got together and formd a strategy. they were able to basically launch a counterattack against this practice and in one generation eradicate it in china. what mao did, he said education for everybody including girls. so that meant girls could go to school with the boys and it was just mandatory education for everybody in the country. but what was even more important, and this is a critical fact, especially for places like saudi arabia and japan, the girls were not only educated but able to work in the formal labor force. the soes so it accepted them. they could get jobs, they could work in factories. that was the beginning of china's economic revolution. light industry which employed women making the cloegs we wear, the shoes we wear, the bags we carry. they were made by women and that jump-started china's economic revolution. >> i think china is a good anecdote to the way we tend to psych ourselves out about the muslim world. yes indeed, in a number of harder line muslim countries, because of culture, women don't have opportunities but culture is not immutable. culture can change. china is the best evidence of that. another thing is i think we tend to psych ourselves out and say isn't it a little imperialist for us to be telling other countries how to treat women? isn't that a value we should leave to them to decide? i think again, sheryl feels so fortunate that there were outsiders who were willing to push against the practice of foot binding. i think there are some practices that you just have to say are not acceptable. >> in india, there used to be a hindu practice that the woman was tossed on the burning funeral pire of the man as a sacrifice. the british just outlawed it and said this is abhorrent and i don't care what people think and it caused riots and all that. talk about islam. we come back to saying it's islam, and until you change the religion really,out can't change anything. >> no, i don't believe that. because christianity at one point had that. judaism had that. every religion had the pat arky and treatment of women. >> it is true the muslim world -- >> it's our dark ages. i think muslim world is living in the dark ages. if we look at it historically it makes historical sense. i do believe we can evolve and that we can do that in a few things. a, i think revival of her circle characters in islam such as ha deej gentleman. mohammed's life was 20 years older than him, a very successful business woman. she hired him as her employee, chose to marry him, and she was the first one who helped him believe in god's message. the revival of characters like ha deej gentleman, if he was alive today, to quote president clinton when he went to saudi arabia, she probably would be the biggest business woman in history. we need tomorrow vooif her in a much more vibrant way. they do believe in the possibility of a cultural and religious evolution as all religions went through this historical period. we'll be back in a moment with more from the panel including why international aid groups now realize it is much smarter to give money to women than men. why when we come back. >> between 50 and 110 million females are missing around the globe, an astonishing figure. it means in any one decade more girls are discriminated against to deaths than all the people who died in all the genocides in the 20th century which is a staggering scope. i'm good about washing my face. but sometimes i wonder... what's left behind? 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[ mike ] listen to the doctor. male announcer: be kind to your eyes with transitions lenses. transitions adapt to changing light so you see your whole day comfortably and conveniently while protecting your eyes from the sun. ask your eyecare professional which transitions lenses are right for you. female announcer: are you a vsp member? your satisfaction with transitions lenses is guaranteed. visit specialoffers.vsp.com/ transitions or ask your vsp doctor. it is a truism in the the world of international development that if you give an aid dollar to a man, he is likely to spend it at the bar or on guns. if you give that same aid dollar to a woman, she will buy necessities, food or diapers or invest it in the family or a moneymaking venture. we're back with nick kristoff, sheryl wudunn and zainab salbi. nick, when you look at the statistic, why do you think that's true? >> that's the part that we really don't know. some people think it's nurturing instinct. other people tend to think it's the way we're socialized. what is true across traditions women are more likely to take income they have and also if they have titled-over assets. if they have financial assets, more likely to convert those to the benefit of their children and to invest in small businesses. >> have you seen this in action? are there there stories where you actually can see this vividly? >> there many different ways that this surfaces. micro finance, a typical way that many people have gotten involved in this issue, if you give a loan to a woman she really tends to take it far. when you give a loan to a man, he can take it somewhere, but often the repayment rates are much lower. big micro financing institutions like rah mean and brack which basically started these things in bangladesh, they didn't want to be discriminatory, but they found women were just repaying at much higher rates than men. they were losing money by giving micro loans to men. they've switched to 97% of lending to women. >> zainab, what do you think about this? do you see this on the ground, that the women put the money to work productively? >> very much so. statistically women spend 97% of their income or their investment on family compared to men who spend 40% on their families. i was in afghanistan a few months ago and i met a woman who was promised to be married of 6, married at 15, a widow and single mother at the age of 16. she talks about how her life led and what she's done with it. during the taliban she was very poor. the taliban beat her up for working in the streets with the very shoes, the only shoes she owned. they broke her shoes and she was very bitter and sad about that. when i met her, she is working, earning $450 a month which is very significant in afghanistan. she's sending her daughter to school and determined that her daughter will not get married until she finishes college. she's going back to her own school, finishing her own education. there's a correlation, if you want to change practices from child marriages to wimg education and women working and the economy, there's a correlation between that and investing in their mother's. that mother in her case knows that i will not repeat to my daughter what i've gone through? she is changing that culture of practice in afghanistan or the behavior practice in afghanistan. there's no better investment in talking about afghans as an example than investment in women who gets it, my money goes to my daughter who will go to college, will get a better life. >> what is the most successful place in which you've operated? you deal with women in distress in so many places. what's your big success story? >> all of them are successful. we work from congo to rowan dough to sudan to afghan and iraq. >> started in bosnia. >> we started in bosnia. a couple of things is, one, we're noticing the first investment women make in terms of how they hire is actually their husbands or sons, the first decision they make. all of them -- in africa women tend to actually run with that $1 investment and do so much with it. that seems to be the most vibrant place in terms of change. i recently met a woman in congo, as we speak right now, hundreds of thousands of women are getting raped in congo. it's the same story usually, she displaced, doesn't have anything, poverty. her husband doesn't know how to deal with the situation. she went through a woman international program. part of what we do is teach vocational and business skills to help them stand on their own feet and she learned soap making. he was cynical. she gave him samples to show it to his friends. he started believing in her soap. instead of her running a separate business of shoep making, she actually made him a partner, but a different kind of partner in which he goes and sells, gives her the money back, she's the one managing the money. i'm enter oefted in the changing of social patterns. she changed the relationship from her giving him all the money and she spends it, as you mentioned erldier on alcohol, cigarettes, prostitution or weapons. now she reverses it. he goes and works, brings her the money. their ooer sending their kids to school, better housing and better life conditions for both of them. i would say africa in general actually where the investment goes triple the way than other countries. >> there's a lot of good news in this book, but there's also a lot of bad news in the sense that -- paint the picture of just how bad it is for women in many parts of the world. >> maybe the best gauge of the discrimination against women and girls is that how much of it is lethal. we don't tend to think of discrimination, gender discrimination as being legal. in much of the world it is. you can look at the population ratios. in india, for example, for the first year of life male and female mortality rates are very similar. they're depending on the breast. the breast doesn't have a preference. age one through five, there is a son preference, the girl doesn't get the same access to food and health care. the upshot is differential levs of mortality that mean between 50 and 110 million females are missing around globe. this means in any one decades, more girls are discriminated against the world than all the people who died in all the genocides of the 20th century. it's a staggering scope. >> finally, what can people do? >> first of all, people have to care. they have to say this is unacceptable as zainab was saying. once each individual can actually say that and take a step, then the politicians will start beginning to notice this is something -- an issue that the voters care about. it really does start with individuals and a mass of individuals to join a movement to create change. it isn't just something that the government does from the top down. the governments have to play the role as well. you also need bottom up. you need grassroots bottom-up movement that starts to change perception and attitudes around the world. >> thank you very much. we will be right back. i am just a -- now for our "what in the world" segment, a very special one. you've probably heard of watson the computer that went head-to-head with humans on jeopardy. you know robots are increasingly used in manufacturing around the country and the world. have you ever heard of a robot sketch comedian? well, meet data. also joining us is data's handler, heather knight, a doctoral researcher in robotics at carnegie-mellon who studies the intersection of entertainment and robotics. data, take it away. >> hello, everybody. can you hear me? all right. the volume is good. okay. thanks. excited to be here. let's get started. gosh, i love saying that. it makes me feel like some kind of superhero, but actually, i am just a mediocre robotic comedian. great to neat you, fareed. get ready for some action. >> i am. >> show me a postcard. >> what data wants here is a postcard of one of three neighborhoods in new york about which he has some comedy sketches prepared. i think of the three neighborhoods, times square, west village and brooklyn. i'm going to choose times square and show him the card. >> good choice. on my way over here, i passed through times square. have you seen the naked cowboy? ♪ i'm the naked cowboy >> he plays the guitar in his underwear in a cowboy hat. ♪ i'm the naked xou boy. you got to do what you got to do ♪ >> just shaking his naked booty. tourists love that guy. i had two video cameras installed on my face. well, that's all i got. did i do okay? be honest. >> no, not really. i was really trying. >> his ego needs some help. >> it's not so bad. >> am i doing a good job? >> yes. >> they love me. they really, really love me. now i can go home happy. >> heather, that was pretty amusing. mostly just fascinating. we should tell the audience that you wrote -- >> catch you later. >> you wrote the routine for data, but his reactions are sort of natural. he senses -- and if there were an audience there, he would actually -- the sensors work so he can sense the audience's reaction. explain how that works. >> robots can learn through lots of data. in some of my work i've been using each member of the audience as kind of a data point for machine learning. a rebot can learn to be more charismatic and more effective communicator and shape a performance for an individual group of people. there can be visual feedback which is kind of conscious or make an iphone app forgiving feedback along the way. i love that joke, you could rate things more like netflix style. >> and the robot, in effect, would incorporate the information and tell more of the jokes that you like and fewer of the ones -- sort of like pandora with the thumbs up or thumbs down. >> absolutely. or t