5 Questions on Data and Security with Valerie Hudson
By Catherine D’Ignazio with editing by Izii Carter
Dr. Valerie Hudson is the director of Texas A&M’s Program on Women, Peace, and Security. She is the co-author (with Andrea M. den Boer) of Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, which received two national book awards as well as coverage from major news outlets. Gloria Steinem named her book Sex and World Peace (co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett) as one of the top three books on her reading list in 2016. Hudson has also developed a nation-by-nation database on women, known as the WomanStats Database, which aims to be “the most comprehensive database on the situation and status of women in the world.”
Lauren Klein and I include the WomanStats Database in “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves” chapter of Data Feminism as an example of how to address issues of power and inequality in data collection environments. There, we pay particular attention to not only the important information gathered in the WomanStats Database, but also to the comprehensive codebook accompanying it. Crucially, this codebook notes how and why certain data points — like those concerning sexual violence — may be skewed due to imperfect reporting measurements that reveal bias. As we write in the book, “WomenStats models how context…
