Missing women

The term 'missing women' indicates a shortfall in the number of women relative to the expected number of women in a region or country. It is most often measured through male-to-female sex ratios, and is theorized to be caused by sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and inadequate healthcare and nutrition for female children. It is argued that technologies that enable prenatal sex selection, which have been commercially available since the 1970s, are a large impetus for missing female children. The term 'missing women' indicates a shortfall in the number of women relative to the expected number of women in a region or country. It is most often measured through male-to-female sex ratios, and is theorized to be caused by sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and inadequate healthcare and nutrition for female children. It is argued that technologies that enable prenatal sex selection, which have been commercially available since the 1970s, are a large impetus for missing female children. The phenomenon was first noted by the Indian Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in an essay in The New York Review of Books in 1990, and expanded upon in his subsequent academic work. Sen originally estimated that more than a hundred million women were 'missing.' Later researchers found differing numbers, with most recent estimates around ninety to 101 million women. These effects are concentrated in countries typically in Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa. However, the disparity has also been found in Chinese and Indian immigrant communities in the United States, albeit to a far lesser degree than in Asia. An estimated 2000 Chinese and Indian female unborn children were aborted between 1991 and 2004, and a shortage can be traced back as far as 1980. Some countries in the former Soviet Union also saw declines in female births after the revolutions of 1989, particularly in the Caucasus region. Other economists, notably Emily Oster, have questioned Sen's explanation, and argued that the shortfall was due to a higher prevalence of the hepatitis B virus in Asia compared to Europe; however, her later research established that Hepatitis B cannot account for more than an insignificant fraction of the missing women. Researchers have also argued that other diseases, HIV/AIDS, natural causes, and female abduction are also responsible for missing women. However, son preference, as well as associated reasons to care for male well-being over female well-being, is still considered to the primary cause. In addition to the health and wellbeing of women, the missing women phenomenon has led to an excess of males in society and an imperfectly balanced marriage market. Because of the association of missing women with female neglect, countries with higher rates of missing women also tend to have higher rates of women in poor health, leading to higher rates of infants in poor health. Researchers argue that increasing women's education and women's employment opportunities can help decrease the number of missing women, but the effects of these policy solutions differ greatly between countries due to differing levels of ingrained sexism between cultures. Various international measures have been instituted to combat the problem of missing women. For example, to bring awareness to the problem of missing women, the OECD measures the number of missing women through the 'Son preference' parameter in its SIGI index. According to Sen, even though women make up the majority of the world's population, the proportion of women in each country's population varies drastically from country to country, with various countries having fewer women than men. This runs contrary to research that females tend to have better survival rates than males, given the same amount of nutritional and medical attention. To capture this divergence from natural sex ratios, the count of 'missing women' is measured as a comparison of a country's male-to-female (or female-to-male) sex ratio compared to the natural sex ratio. Unlike female mortality rates, estimates of 'missing women' include counts of sex-specific abortions, which Sen cites as a large factor contributing to the disparity of sex ratios from country to country. Furthermore, female mortality rates fail to account for intergenerational effects from female discrimination, while a comparison of a country's sex ratio to natural sex ratios would. Sen's original research found that while there are typically more women than men in European and North American countries (at around 0.98 men to 1 woman for most countries), the sex ratio of developing countries in Asia, as well as the Middle East, is much higher (in number of males for each female). For example, in China, the ratio of men to women is 1.06, far higher than most countries. The ratio is much higher than that for those born after 1985, when ultrasound technology became widely available. Using actual numbers, this means that in China alone, there are 50 million women 'missing' – that should be there but are not. Adding up similar numbers from South and West Asia results in a number of 'missing' women higher than 100 million. According to Sen, 'These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women.'