In 1908, a Methodist laywoman named Anna Jarvis celebrated the first modern Mother’s Day at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, W.V. Her campaign to make Mother’s Day a recognized holiday in the United States had begun in 1905, the year her beloved mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Anna’s mission was to honor her own mother by continuing the work she had started and to set aside a day to honor mothers, “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”
In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation creating Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday. Since that time, Mother’s Day has been celebrated throughout the United States and the world. Six years later, the 19th Amendment was passed, which prohibits state or federal gender-based restrictions on voting.
The vision of Anna Jarvis to honor mothers and to change public policy nationally and globally, in order to further recognize and empower women, is still needed. Today, our progress toward the empowerment of women is as reliable only as the data used to track specific improvements. Asma Lateef, director of Bread for the World Institute, says the world has few, if any, real-life examples of countries with full gender equality.
The Institute argues gender inequality is an indicator of hunger in the world.
Thanks to today’s technology, we can actually visualize gender inequality. When we look at this issue from a visual perspective, we can see the best available statistics, broken down by country, are actually missing a staggering amount of information.
While data can tell powerful stories, in this case, the lack of data is the story. Bread for the World Institute has produced an interactive data tool that makes this unavailable information “visible.”
You can see at a glance how missing data on gender leaves hundreds of millions of women out of the picture at hungerreport.org/missingdata.
The Institute’s data tool uses 52 indicators identified by the U.N. Economic and Social Council in 2012 as essential to showing the state of gender equality. The indicators range from the most obvious—such as the incidence of gender-based violence—to those that might seem less relevant at first glance.
During the past few decades, there have been major changes in how many women live their lives. This is clear with or without enough data to tell us exactly what happened and how. But there’s growing agreement that the world needs to make more far-reaching and sustained progress on women’s empowerment.
Lateef further states, “Data is the yardstick by which we measure progress. Identifying the many missing marks on the yardstick means that individual countries and the global community will know what they don’t know.”
Then they can effectively begin to gather this information—starting this year, as the world adopts the Sustainable Development Goals that can lead us to the end of hunger and extreme poverty within 15 years.
Rev. Dr. Angelique Walker-Smith is Bread for the World’s national senior associate for African-American and African church engagement.
