Last year, a quiet but powerful book, Sex and World Peace, was published by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and scholars. The authors, Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad F. Emmett, set out to demonstrate and document the complex but evident relationship between how girls and women are treated and the security of the states in which they live.
The authors took the question, “How does a nation’s security affect the status of its women?” and asked instead, “Does the status of women affect a nation’s security?” The answer was a resounding, “Yes!” And their results and recommendations are startling in their power and clarity.
The book’s conclusions are compellingly derived from the authors’ construction and use of the WomanSTATS project and database, which contains more than 148,000 data points and includes more than 375 variables for 175 countries. It is the most comprehensive bank of data on the status of women in the world today, including information about everything from domestic violence, maternal mortality and rape to education and women’s political participation.
The very clear thesis of the book is that the very best indicator and predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not wealth, military expenditures, or religion; the best predictor is how well its girls and women are treated.
Read more: What Does Sex Have to Do with World Peace? : Ms. Magazine Blog
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