Carl Brinton and Dr. Valerie Hudson, Political Science
In short, the project was a great success. The hypotheses tested all came out with greater statistical significance than we had even hoped for. The implications of our findings have a deep potential impact, and beyond merely presenting the findings at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, we are now in the final stages of editing the paper to submit it to the International Studies Quarterly journal for publication.
This project is the result not only of my work with Dr. Hudson, but also the work of dozens of individuals on the WomanStats Project for the last six years. The project has now grown in include over 60,000 data points on 245 variables on 172 countries (all countries with a population over 200,000), making it the largest database on the status of women in the world. One point of the research that this mentoring grant enabled was to use the WomanStats Database and see what potential exists within it. On this front the research was a great success.
Without the WomanStats Database we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did: compare 141 countries on a scale of discrepancy of enforcement of laws protecting women and girls, which involved 21 variables from the WomanStats Database. This scale was the independent variable of our research design and, as such, was a fundamental part to our research. During Summer 2007 term I worked with Dr. Hudson and another researcher to take data from the WomanStats Database and apply a rubric we developed in order to scale the discrepancy variables. The scaling formed 5 categories of severity. The categories were as follows:
0 The laws are consonant with the United Nations Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and are well enforced by the government; such enforcement is a high priority of the government.
1 The laws are consonant with CEDAW; these are mostly enforced, and the government appears to be fairly proactive in challenging cultural norms which harm women.
2 The laws are for the most part consonant with CEDAW, but there is spotty enforcement; the government may or may not signal its interest in challenging cultural norms harmful to women.
3 Laws are generally consonant with CEDAW, with little effective enforcement; improving the situation of women appears to be a low priority for the government.
4 There is virtually no enforcement of laws consonant with CEDAW, or such laws do not even exist.
There were three clusters of variables:
1. Physical security
2. Education
3. Family freedom
The dependent variables were a measure of how much of a state of concern to the international community (SOCIC) any given nation-state were. The categories were as follows:
On measures of the extent to which the state has been non-compliant with
international economic, political, and use-of-force norms:
0=Not of concern to the international community
1=Of little concern to the international community
2=Of some concern to the international community
3=Of significant concern to the international community
4=Of greatest concern to the international community
There were three clusters of variables:
1. Economic non-compliance
2. Political non-compliance
3. Use-of-force (violence) non-compliance
Using various statistical methods, we tested nine hypotheses on correlations between the variable clusters. Our results shocked even us. The correlation between the discrepancy scale and the SOCIC scale came back so statistically significant, that both Dr. Hudson and I went back to the data to double check and ensure that there was no inherent correlation that would make the results seem better than they actually were. After carefully perusing the variables, we determined that it was not an error, but that the correlation simply was that robust.
We then sought to see if discrepancy held up against the common explanations of the SOCIC scale: freedom and wealth. Using different statistical tests and with the help of a statistician, we determined how much of the SOCIC scale discrepancy, freedom, and wealth were able to explain. In those tests discrepancy once again proved statistically significant.
The implications of these findings are potentially extremely meaningful. Rather than seeing treatment of women as a symptom, political scientists, policymakers, and government officials would start to see treatment of women as a root cause to oppression, poverty, and non-compliance with international norms. This would bring the issue of gender equality out of the recesses of “feminism” and “gender studies” only and bring it to the forefront of all research and discussions on issues of national and international security.
More research must be done, especially of a longitudinal nature in order to show a more clear empirical causal link, but the results of this research project have been telling, and require us to continue using the great resource of the WomanStats Database to explore the status of women and its link to the status of the world and its people.