Research of interest I

I'm surrounded by interesting research in my daily work. Every day I read and learn something new. Some of it isn't that interesting, but some of it is very interesting to me. Just think how it would be to do research in an area that could change public policy and thereby changes lives for the better. I think it would be amazing to be involved in something like that. Such is the case with a BYU professor who I have known for any years. I mentioned her work here a few months ago. She is in the headlines again and is making tremendous strides in the area of raising awareness of women's issues around the world.

"Look closely at the way women are treated, says Valerie Hudson. Look at the nonchalance with which a nation's men beat their wives, or the dismissive way a country condones genital mutilation. These are clues, she says, about that nation's likelihood of waging war.

Hudson, professor of political science at Brigham Young University, is lead researcher of a seven-year study looking at the connection between the treatment of women and the peacefulness of nations.

The project is called WomanStats, and although the name suggests an arid landscape of demographics, the project reveals vivid layers of pain and injustice — marital rape and the infanticide of baby girls, sex trafficking and prohibitions about owning land, government exploitation of women and the cultural belief that a wife can be "inherited" as if she were property.

It has been widely assumed that other factors are more predictive of whether a nation might be unstable or aggressive. The three most likely candidates were poverty levels, lack of democracy, and the nation's adherence to Islamic values. But the WomanStats project offers a fourth predictor of a nation's instability. Violence against women (VAW, in the shorthand of WomanStats) trumps the other explanations, proving to be three times more predictive of a nation's instability than whether a country is Islamic, and one-and-a-half times more predictive than whether a country is undemocratic, Hudson says.

Hudson is a gentle, energetic woman, a feminist in a culture that has often felt uneasy about feminism. She is a groundbreaking researcher, and a mother who has seen her share of heartbreak."

I admit that I have some feminist leanings and that is probably why I like Valerie's work so much. I'm always going to be an advocate for women and girls who oftentimes are at the mercy of some overbearing men. Rick thinks I should volunteer at the Women's and Children's justice center in our area. It think it might be a good fit for me at some point in the future.

And an honor that she recently received:

Prof. Hudson was named in Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers for showing that gender imbalances have global consequences. See the link here.

97. Valerie Hudson

Political scientist Brigham Young University Provo, Utah

Hudson's indispensable 2004 study Bare Branches may have been partially responsible for the scaling back of China's one-child policy; the book, written with Andrea den Boer, explored how unequal sex ratios in a country might augur war, social unrest, and other problems. This year, Hudson used her knowledge of the impact of sex ratios on society to explore not just the widening gap in China but also the impact of the Great Recession, which left millions more men than women unemployed, with potentially disastrous implications for security worldwide.