Welzel derived a way to capture a commitment to emancipative values in a single number, based on his discovery that the answers to a cluster of survey items tend to correlate across people, countries, and regions of the world with a common history and culture. The items embrace gender equality *(whether people feel that women should have an equal right to jobs, political leadership, and a university education), personal choice (whether they feel that divorce, homosexuality, and abortion may be justified), political voice *whether they believe that people should be guaranteed freedom of speech and a say in government, communities, and the workplace), and childrearing philosophy (whether they feel that children should be encouraged to be obedient or independent and imaginative). The correlations among these items are far from perfect—abortion, in particular, divides people who agree on much else—but they tend to go together and collectively predict many things about a country.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 224