Her two sons, who have been treated with glutathione, are now "healthy as horses," Hudson reports. But in 2005, her 18-year-old daughter, Ariel Singer, was one of four hikers who drowned in a cave on "Y" mountain in Provo.

Hudson made international headlines again with her 2004 book, "Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population," co-written with Andrea den Boer. Their thesis: sex-selection in China and India — the abortion of female fetuses as a result of one-child policies and a cultural favoritism toward boys — has resulted in a lopsided ratio of boys to girls (an average of 116 to 120 boys per every 100 girls). And that, they argued, is already resulting in higher levels of violence and instability.

WomanStats is an extension of that thesis, expanded to include all mistreatment of women on a global scale. Sometimes it's a country's laws that keep women oppressed; but sometimes it's the more insidious way that officials turn their back on injustice. In sub-Saharan Africa, domestic violence is illegal, but if a woman shows up at a police station complaining that her husband beat her, the police will simply laugh at her, Hudson says.

The real roots of violence on a national level "may be found in the mundane situations of the household," Hudson says.

With the help of dozens of BYU undergraduate students, Hudson and her colleagues sifted through thousands of statistics, laws, practices, anecdotes and interpretations, in 174 countries with populations exceeding 200,000, looking at 260 variables. To date there are nearly 100,000 data points, some of them contradictory; but, taken as a whole, they provide a deeper look at how women are treated.

It's now "the largest aggregation of data about women that exists in the world," Hudson says. The data is available, free, at www.womanstats.org.

"You can look at numbers all day long, and compare them, and numbers are important," says WomanStats student coder Caitlin Carroll, a BYU senior who has worked on the project for two years. But when you add laws, practices, personal interviews from country experts and NGOs, and stories from women themselves, "it all comes together to form a bigger picture."

Often gender is overlooked by countries, even though it's crucial, says Afton Beutler, vice president of international affairs at the Worldwide Organization for Women, who describes Hudson as a "very careful social scientist, who doesn't jump to conclusions."