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The CGD Podcast
Linking Women and Foreign Policy - Valerie Hudson
00:21:10
For a long time, foreign policy was largely "a world minus women," says Valerie Hudson, Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. That's beginning to change, as policymakers...
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- [00:06]
A
Hello and welcome to the CGD Podcast with me, Rajesh Merchandani. Today I'm joined by Valerie Hudson, who's a Professor and George H.W. bush Chair at the Department of International affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A and M University. She's visiting us because she's been telling us about the project that she's a lead researcher on. It's called Women Stats. It's an enormous database that covers more than 360 variables across 175 nations. Thousands and thousands of individual data points all about the status of women in the world, culturally, politically, legally. Valerie, welcome. It's great to have you here.
- [00:46]
B
Thank you. It's lovely to be here, Rajesh.
- [00:48]
A
Now, the reason that you say that you started this database or that it's needed is, as you say in the promotional materials that go with it, the fate of nations is tied to the status of women. And this database, Women Stats, makes that visible and demonstrable for the first time. So just explain that a little bit to us. To begin with, the fate of nations is tied to the status of women.
- [01:11]
B
Yes. I'm a security studies researcher and so one of the interesting things about my field of study is that for a long time the, the notion that women had anything to do with the security of a nation was completely missing. It was a world that was minus women, if you will. Foreign policy, security and women didn't seem to even inhabit the same planet. But I think that's broken down over the years. I think more and more we have begun to realize that whether we're talking about food, security, health, whether we're talking about economic prosperity, we need to be including women in the discussion because their situation and their status affects what's going to happen with these national level variables.
- [01:59]
A
I'm really interested in the kind of the premise you put out there that foreign policy has ignored women. Explain how that manifested itself and how do we see that in the world today?
- [02:10]
B
Oh, absolutely. For example, something just very, very simple. Whenever we have a trouble spot in the world, there may be a call for UN peacekeepers to go into the area. The blue hats are going to come in as the good guys and they're going to straighten up the situation. But that's only true if you're looking at it without a gender lens. If you look at it with a gender lens, then what you have is still predominantly to this day, over 95% of UN peacekeepers are men. And there are men who are going to come into your area and set up their barracks and they're going to be in charge of providing security and perhaps even material assistance to the population. Well, what's that going to end up with? Well, it's going to end up with the types of scandals that we see today, which is where peacekeepers have actually preyed upon women and children, offering protection and material assistance only on provision of sexual favors. Even things that we think about as very unproblematic, such as UN peacekeepers, become much more problematic when we add a gender lens.
- [03:22]
A
Is the answer to that to have female peacekeepers?
- [03:25]
B
Well, I think there's many answers to that. One of them may in fact be additional all female units. And those are being contemplated. But I think there's also what's missing is a sense of accountability for those peacekeepers. If a peacekeeper misbehaves, he's simply sent back to his home country. And there may be no other accountability besides that.
- [03:47]
A
So let's talk about the database women stats then. How do you think this database could address the kind of problems that you're describing?
- [03:58]
B
What I discovered very early on when I tried to make the case that what was going on with women was actually going to, for example, affect the success or the failure of national programs, even peacekeeping programs, was that people would dismiss the work, saying, well, that's anecdote, that's anecdote. And so as someone who teaches both qualitative and quantitative methods, it quickly became apparent to me that if you wish to have some real impact, you're going to have to be prepared to do rigorous statistical analysis of large n samples of nations. And only in that way can you garner the type of warrant that will allow what you're saying to be heard. And so while I think that qualitative information, what other people are dismissing as anecdotes is actually extremely valuable, I always accompany it by these more conventional types of data analyses that help people to get over the hurdles of believing that women in fact do matter in national security.
- [05:08]
A
One of the things that we work a lot on here at the Centre for Global Development, as you know, is data improving data, delivering the data revolution that, for example, the UN called for when we moved to the SDGs. Better data, more data, and increasing the capacity of local organizations within countries to gather their own data. Women stats seems to fit absolutely into that. What kind of things are we going to learn or do you hope to learn? What are you measuring in it?
- [05:38]
B
Well, we measure just as many aspects of women's situation as we can because we're not, we Never put all our eggs in one basket. So, for example, most of the variables that have been used in statistical analyses include things like women's labor force participation, levels of maternal mortality, government representation in national legislatures, primary school enrollment rates and discrepancy with males. And these are sort of standard variables that are easily quantifia. But you know what, that's not necessarily where the action is. So, for example, we have found that one of the most important clusters of variables to examine in looking at the linkages between women in governance and women in security is actually family law. Looking at the types of strictures on inheritance, on land rights, on even choice in marriage or age in marriage, the that constrain a woman's life in a very real and very personal sense. Well, you're not going to get numbers on those kinds of things, right? Because here you're looking at customs and you're looking at practices, and that's going to be qualitative information. And that's where we see the real value added of a database like woman Stats. Because while we do take quantitative data, we also embrace the qualitative. So those customs, those practices, whether law is enforced or not, all of that information can be found in our data database.
- [07:07]
A
And actually in your leaflet here, you've color coded countries of the world according to how legislation, whether legislation in those countries discriminates against women. And you say you make the point that often practice follows law. So if there are countries where there is a lot of discrimination written into law, practice follows law. And even in some countries where there is little discrimination in legislation, there are practices that lag behind as well. So what would you say are the kind of best performing or worst performing countries?
- [07:40]
B
Well, if we're talking specifically about family law, it is true that most of what we would consider to be the wealthier countries, well, with some exceptions, generally have fairly good family law for women. Nevertheless, there may be issues of enforcement. So for example, even in South Korea, which now has pretty progressive laws for women, there's still practices where land, for example, is inherited primarily by males and not by females in the family line. So you do need to look at both practice and law to get the full picture on what's happening with women.
- [08:21]
A
Just looking at this color coded map, it's interesting to see, for example, that a lot of countries in Latin America are doing quite well. According to your ranking, what you've classed as virtually no discrimination codified, but practice tends to discriminate more than law. So is that a kind of, I mean, it's got it's colored in green in the maps and green is usually a good thing.
- [08:42]
B
Yes. Yeah, well, it's a lighter green, it's not a darker green. You'll see the darker green is in the Scandinavian nations where practice and law are pretty much the same thing, but notably America.
- [08:53]
A
The US is, is sort of yellow. Not so good actually.
- [08:58]
B
Yes, we do have some interesting family law practices, particularly considered issues like custody of children and so forth. Latin America's law has led forth in much more progressive than it has been in the past, yet there are still practices. For example, one of the issues with women in Latin America is that oftentimes marriages are not made official, were not registered, and as such the types of marital rights that women may normally possess under the law may be absent for women who have not been officially married. And this tends to be a recurring problem in Latin America.
- [09:40]
A
A lot of this work you can find on the women stats website, womenstats.org it's fascinating stuff. I urge you to take a look at it. One of the things that I know your work from, that I studied is bare branches. The bare branches work, the idea, you may have to correct me, it's been a few years that you have large numbers of unmarried working age men and that is a potential security problem for a country. But you're nodding. So I did get that. Right. I did remember that correctly from my master's.
- [10:12]
B
Right, Right. It's not only large numbers, the youth bulge. Right. But it's also the notion that these young men are surplus to the number of women in the country because parents have actually been culling, either through sex, selective abortion or passive or active infanticide, girls from the population and called bare.
- [10:35]
A
Branches because I think it's the idea that a bear branch has no leaves, is not connected to a tree and the tree represents the family and stable.
- [10:43]
B
That's right. There'll be no fruit off that branch of the family tree because the girls who should have grown up to become that boy's wife and mother of the next generation was actually culled from the population instead.
- [10:55]
A
And what was interesting to me and why I brought it up is because that's a kind of known component of, you know, conflict, you know, potential conflict within a country. Your work has gone on to talk about how the level of security in a country is directly correlated to the treatment of women in a country. Talk to me a little bit about that.
- [11:14]
B
Yeah, well, and you know, we weren't sure whether that was going to be the case or not. We were very interested in finding out how the physical security of women compared to other explanatory factors such as level of democracy or level of wealth and so forth. And what we were able to demonstrate is that actually the best predictor of level of peacefulness of a given nation was the level of fiscal security of women. It was actually a better predictor than how democratic the nation was. So, for example, in the set of democratic nations, we were actually able to show that some of those democratic nations had as bad profiles as non democratic nations based on their treatment of women. So that was kind of an important breakthrough for us, which led us to see a variety of linkages between what's happening with women and how that translates onto the larger national stage.
- [12:10]
A
And were you surprised by that finding?
- [12:12]
B
In one way I wasn't, because I had read enough of the qualitative information that had been dismissed as anecdotes to know that this was in fact the case. But you never know how something's going to happen when you operationalize variables and collect data and run regressions. But to see it come out pretty starkly like that was really excellent. It was an excellent moment.
- [12:37]
A
And it sort of speaks to what. One of the things that the UN has been leading on in moving from the MDGs to the SDGs is this idea of disaggregation of data. The MDGs didn't really reflect disproportionate burdens on different parts of the population, for example, women. And so one of the needs in the SDGs for much clearer, much better data is to be able to disaggregate and find out exactly who is being discriminated against, exactly who is benefiting the most.
- [13:08]
B
That's absolutely right. And one of the key parts, of course, are the National Statistical Bureaus, many of which just do not have the capacity and sometimes do not have the will to collect these kinds of data. And I think the center for Global Development is involved in helping on that score. And I applaud you for that. So in addition to the lack of capacity, there's also a lack of will. These statistics, of course, are a very open kind of assessment of how your country is doing. And so it may be a point of national pride to minimize certain negative phenomenon. Another issue is that in a case, for example, such as a phenomenon like marital rape, there are still over 80 countries in the world that do not consider marital rape to be a crime. So why would you collect statistics on something that you don't consider to be a crime? Right. So these kinds of things, I think, are still Big challenges for the data community.
- [14:17]
A
That's a really interesting point that you just made there about why would you collect data on something you don't consider to be a crime? Because I suppose it leads us to talk about the implications for policymakers of this database. How important is it for that?
- [14:33]
B
Oh, my goodness. I think that the purpose of data is to make these linkages visible so that policymakers say, obviously we need to do something about this. But you can't do unless you see. And that's why these data projects are so important and woman status quo included in that.
- [14:59]
A
And the work you were talking at CGD earlier about, that's led by Amanda Glassman, leading our health initiative. Plenty of information about that on our website as well. Let's start looking forward to how you hope this database will be used and who will be using it. Because it's important that you made it an open access database.
- [15:18]
B
Yeah. You know, at times, you know, any scholarly research project is always wanting for money to. So at times people have said, well, you know, you should charge for access to this data. And I've always resisted that. I've always said no. I mean, I want to lower the barriers for students, for journalists, for policymakers, for researchers to be able to get whatever data they need on the situation of women. Because that's how change is going to happen if more and more people begin researching this. So the access to our data is absolutely free on our website. All you have to do is create a free account and you're in.
- [15:57]
A
From studying this closely, do you think that the status of women in the world is changing for the better or not? You're kind of smiling a wry smile there.
- [16:09]
B
I am smiling awry smile.
- [16:10]
A
And the reason I'm asking is because. The reason I'm asking is because it is such a focus of the post 2015 development agenda. It has been a focus, say, of the UK Department of International Development's work on ending violence against women and girls. There's a lot of focus on this. I'm wondering if you think there's been any change.
- [16:29]
B
That's a wonderful question, Rajesh. And let me just say that on some things, yes, there has been change for the better. Maternal mortality rates are down and they're down significantly. Disparity in primary enrollment rates between girls and boys. You're hard pressed to find areas in which that gap has not been reduced or eliminated entirely. I think what remains very, very stubborn, however, is levels of violence against women as well as lack of voice for women as well as, again, Certain customary strictures on women that have not been loosened, such as issues of forced or arranged or early marriage, for example. So while we've had progress, good progress, admirable progress in some areas, it almost goes to show you that it's really not a question of education. Because, after all, a woman who's a college graduate can be beaten up by her husband just as well as someone who's a high school dropout. The fact that violence has not decreased against women even as they have attained parity in education is kind of a stunning fact that our world needs to look squarely at.
- [17:56]
A
Wow, that's. But isn't that then the issue? The issue, then, surely, is about educating the men, not the women.
- [18:03]
B
Yes, but it's not, you know, it's not the kind of education you get in a public school, is it? And here we would bring in, I think, some of the praise were the attempts of former President Jimmy Carter to engage religious leaders and ask them, why are they not coming down against violence against women and saying, you know, you as a man are not a good member of our religion if you oppress or do violence against women. I think you're also wonderful NGOs such as Promundo, who. Who are working with men to redefine masculinity. So masculinity does not mean I oppress and subordinate women. So that's absolutely where this is all going, Rajesh, which is that you could educate people till the cows come home, and they may still beat their wives and daughters. Right. It's got to be a change of mind. It's got to be a change of heart. And so we need those who are. Who are leaders in that area to ask men to step up to the plate.
- [19:12]
A
It doesn't sound like you have much confidence that the world will actually achieve proper equality and end discrimination against women. Or do you?
- [19:23]
B
I have hope, you know, I live. I have five sons and three daughters, and I have a husband, and I live in peace with my husband. And I know that my sons will live in peace with their wives, and I know my daughters will live in peace with their husbands. But I also know that violence against women is very useful. It gets you what you want. And insofar as the human species is known for its self interest, I think there will always be a temptation to use force, to use coercion, to get whatever it is that you think matters. And so will we ever see an eradication of violence against women? Probably not. Can we see a growing consensus that eradication of violence against women is important. Could I foresee religious leaders actually putting that at the top of their agenda? I could. I'm hopeful in that regard. We will see what happens.
- [20:26]
A
Well, Valerie Hudson, it's been a pleasure as someone who studied your work. It's been a pleasure to meet you. And I want to thank you for giving us sometimes stark but always honest assessment of the area that you've made your career in. It's been fascinating to listen to you. Thank you very much for joining us.
- [20:42]
B
Thank you. I appreciate your invitation.
- [20:45]
A
That website again is womanstats.org and of course, plenty more information on our website, cgdev.org I'm Rajesh Merchandani, and thank you for joining us for this edition of the CGD podcast. Join us again for the next one.