Missing women of Asia
Encyclopedia
The phenomenon of the missing women of Asia is a shortfall in the number of women in Asia
relative to the number that would be expected if there was no sex-selective abortion or female infanticide or if the newborn of both sexes received similar levels of health care and nutrition.
The phenomenon was first noted by the India
n, 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 100 million women were "missing" (in the sense that their potential existence had been eliminated either through sex selective abortion, infanticide or inadequate nutrition during infancy).
Originally some other economists, notably Emily Oster
, questioned Sen's explanation, and argued that the shortfall was due to higher prevalence of the hepatitis B virus in Asia compared to Europe
. Further research however, has established that the prevalence of hepatitis B cannot account for more than an insignificant fraction of the missing women." As a result, Sen's explanation for the phenomenon is still the most accepted one.
Research conducted by Monica Das Gupta and others has identified a number of societal factors responsible for the elimination of females phenomenon.
of developing countries in Asia, as well as the Middle East, is much lower. This runs contrary to research that females tend to have better survival rates than males, given the same amount of nutritional and medical attention. In China, the ratio of men to women is 1.06, far higher than most countries. Translating this into an actual number 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."
While the disease is fairly uncommon in US and Europe, it is endemic
in China and very common in other parts of Asia. Oster argued that this difference in disease prevalence could account for about 45% of the supposed "missing women", and even as high as 75% of the ones in China. Furthermore, Oster showed that the introduction of a Hepatitis B vaccine had a lagged effect of equalizing the gender ratio towards what one would expect if other factors did not play a role.
Oster later dismissed her own hypothesis (see below), asserting Hepatitis B plays no role in forming gender ratio.
However, the fact that the skewness arose only among the later born but not as much among the first born children, suggested that factors other than the disease were involved.
Das Gupta pointed out that the female-male ratio changed in relation to average household income in a way that was consistent with Sen's hypothesis but not Oster's. In particular, lower household income eventually leads to a higher boy/girl ratio. Furthermore Das Gupta documented that the gender birth order was significantly different conditional on the sex of the first child.
If the first child was male, then the sex of the subsequent children tended to follow the regular, biologically determined sex pattern (boys born with probability .512, girls born with probability .488). However, if the first child was female, the subsequent children had a much higher probability of being male, indicating that conscious parental choice was involved in determining the sex of the child. Neither of these phenomena can be explained by the prevalence of Hepatitis B.
They are however consistent with Sen's contention that it is purposeful human action - in the form of selective abortion and perhaps even infanticide and female infant neglect - that is the cause of the skewed gender ratio.
However, in a 2008 study published in the American Economic Review, Lin and Luoh utilized data on almost 3 million births in Taiwan over a long period of time and found that the effect of maternal Hepatitis B infection on the probability of male birth was very small, about one quarter of one percent. This meant that the rates of Hepatitis B infection among mothers could not account for the missing women.
The remaining possibility was that it was the infection among fathers that could lead to a skewed birth ratio. However, Oster, together with Chen, Yu and Lin, in a follow up study to Lin and Luoh examined a data set of 67,000 births (15% of whom were Hepatitis B carriers) and found no effect of infection on birth ratio for either the mothers or fathers. As a result Oster retracted her earlier hypothesis.http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/emily.oster/papers/hbvnotecon.pdf This retraction was praised by the John Bates Clark Medal
winner and Freakonomics
author Steven Levitt
for its honesty.
and Punjab
regions of India
than in poorer areas, and also the high prevalence of this prejudice among the more educated and affluent women (mothers) there. Contrary to the conventional wisdom expectations, in India there are more missing women in developed urban areas, than in backward rural regions. The bias against girls is very evident among the relatively highly developed, middle-class dominated nations (Taiwan
, South Korea
, Singapore
, Armenia
, Azerbaijan
, Georgia
) and the immigrant Asian communities in the United States
and Britain
. Only recently and in some countries (particularly South Korea) have the development and educational campaigns begun to turn the tide, resulting in more normal gender ratios.
According to Das Gupta's research done in Punjab in the 1980s, girls were not receiving inferior treatment if a girl was born as a first child in a given family, when the parents still had high hopes for obtaining a son later. Subsequent births of girls were however unwelcome, because each such birth diminished a chance of the family having a son. The more affluent and educated women would have fewer offspring, and therefore were under more acute pressure to produce a son as early as possible. As ultrasound imaging and other techniques increasingly allow early prediction of the child's sex, the more affluent families opt for an abortion, or if a girl is born, decrease her chance of survival by, for example, not providing sufficient medical care.
One reason for parents, even mothers, to avoid daughters is the traditional patriarchal culture in the countries where the elimination of females takes place. As parents grow older they can expect much more help and support from their independent sons, than from daughters, who after getting married become in a sense property of their husbands' families, and, even if educated and generating significant income, have limited ability to interact with their natal families. Women are also often practically unable to inherit real estate, so a mother-widow will lose her family's (in reality her late husband's) plot of land and become indigent if she had had only daughters. Poor rural families have meager resources to distribute among their children, which reduces the opportunity to discriminate against girls.
With high per capita income growth in many parts of India and China during the late 1990s and the 2000s, male/female ratios have began shifting towards "normal" levels. However, for India and China, this appears to be due to a fall in adult female mortality rates, relative to male adults, rather than a change in the sex ratio among children and newborns.
A different development occurred in South Korea
which in the early 1990s had one of the highest male to female ratios in the world. By 2007 however, South Korea, had a male to female ratio comparable to that found in Western Europe, US and Sub Saharan Africa.
This development characterized both adult ratios as well as the ratios among new births. According to Chung and Das Gupta rapid economic growth and development in South Korea has led to a sweeping change in social attitudes and reduced the preference for sons. Das Gupta, Chung, and Shuzhuo conclude that it is possible that China and India will experience a similar reversal in trend towards normal sex ratio in the near future if their rapid economic development, combined with policies that seek to promote gender equality, continue. This reversal has been interpreted as the latest phase of a more complex cycle called the "sex ratio transition".
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
relative to the number that would be expected if there was no sex-selective abortion or female infanticide or if the newborn of both sexes received similar levels of health care and nutrition.
The phenomenon was first noted by the India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n, Nobel Prize–winning economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...
in an essay in The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
in 1990, and expanded upon in his subsequent academic work. Sen originally estimated that more than a 100 million women were "missing" (in the sense that their potential existence had been eliminated either through sex selective abortion, infanticide or inadequate nutrition during infancy).
Originally some other economists, notably Emily Oster
Emily Oster
Emily Fair Oster is an American economist. After receiving an B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, Oster moved to the University of Chicago where she is now a Becker Fellow, which is a two year position at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory...
, questioned Sen's explanation, and argued that the shortfall was due to higher prevalence of the hepatitis B virus in Asia compared to Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. Further research however, has established that the prevalence of hepatitis B cannot account for more than an insignificant fraction of the missing women." As a result, Sen's explanation for the phenomenon is still the most accepted one.
Research conducted by Monica Das Gupta and others has identified a number of societal factors responsible for the elimination of females phenomenon.
Background and Sen's original contention
According to Sen, women allegedly make up the majority of the world's population, even though this is not the case throughout every country. While there are typically more women than men in European and North American countries (at around 0.98 to 1 for most of them), the sex ratioSex ratio
Sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population. The primary sex ratio is the ratio at the time of conception, secondary sex ratio is the ratio at time of birth, and tertiary sex ratio is the ratio of mature organisms....
of developing countries in Asia, as well as the Middle East, is much lower. This runs contrary to research that females tend to have better survival rates than males, given the same amount of nutritional and medical attention. In China, the ratio of men to women is 1.06, far higher than most countries. Translating this into an actual number 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."
Dismissed "Hepatitis B virus" explanation
In her PhD dissertation at Harvard, Emily Oster argued that Sen's hypothesis did not take account of the different rates of prevalence of the Hepatitis B virus between Asia and other parts of the world. Regions with higher rates of Hep B infection tend to have higher ratios of male to female births for biological reasons which are not yet well understood, but which have been extensively documented.While the disease is fairly uncommon in US and Europe, it is endemic
Endemic (epidemiology)
In epidemiology, an infection is said to be endemic in a population when that infection is maintained in the population without the need for external inputs. For example, chickenpox is endemic in the UK, but malaria is not...
in China and very common in other parts of Asia. Oster argued that this difference in disease prevalence could account for about 45% of the supposed "missing women", and even as high as 75% of the ones in China. Furthermore, Oster showed that the introduction of a Hepatitis B vaccine had a lagged effect of equalizing the gender ratio towards what one would expect if other factors did not play a role.
Oster later dismissed her own hypothesis (see below), asserting Hepatitis B plays no role in forming gender ratio.
Subsequent research
Oster's challenge was met with counter arguments of its own as researchers tried to sort out the available data and control for other possible conflating factors. Avraham Ebenstein questioned Oster's conclusion based on the fact that among first born children the sex ratio is close to the natural one. It is the skewed female-male ratios among second and third born children that account for the bulk of the disparity. In other words, if Hepatitis B was responsible for the skewed ratio then one would expect it to be true among all children, regardless of birth order.However, the fact that the skewness arose only among the later born but not as much among the first born children, suggested that factors other than the disease were involved.
Das Gupta pointed out that the female-male ratio changed in relation to average household income in a way that was consistent with Sen's hypothesis but not Oster's. In particular, lower household income eventually leads to a higher boy/girl ratio. Furthermore Das Gupta documented that the gender birth order was significantly different conditional on the sex of the first child.
If the first child was male, then the sex of the subsequent children tended to follow the regular, biologically determined sex pattern (boys born with probability .512, girls born with probability .488). However, if the first child was female, the subsequent children had a much higher probability of being male, indicating that conscious parental choice was involved in determining the sex of the child. Neither of these phenomena can be explained by the prevalence of Hepatitis B.
They are however consistent with Sen's contention that it is purposeful human action - in the form of selective abortion and perhaps even infanticide and female infant neglect - that is the cause of the skewed gender ratio.
Resolution of the debate
Part of the difficulty in discerning between the two competing hypotheses was the fact that while the link between Hepatitis B and a higher likelihood of male birth had been documented, there was little information available on the strength of this link and how it varied by which of the parents were the carriers. Furthermore most prior medical studies did not use a sufficiently high number of observations to convincingly estimate the magnitude of the relationship.However, in a 2008 study published in the American Economic Review, Lin and Luoh utilized data on almost 3 million births in Taiwan over a long period of time and found that the effect of maternal Hepatitis B infection on the probability of male birth was very small, about one quarter of one percent. This meant that the rates of Hepatitis B infection among mothers could not account for the missing women.
The remaining possibility was that it was the infection among fathers that could lead to a skewed birth ratio. However, Oster, together with Chen, Yu and Lin, in a follow up study to Lin and Luoh examined a data set of 67,000 births (15% of whom were Hepatitis B carriers) and found no effect of infection on birth ratio for either the mothers or fathers. As a result Oster retracted her earlier hypothesis.http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/emily.oster/papers/hbvnotecon.pdf This retraction was praised by the John Bates Clark Medal
John Bates Clark Medal
The John Bates Clark Medal is awarded by the American Economic Association to "that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge"...
winner and Freakonomics
Freakonomics
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a 2005 non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics, but has also been described as...
author Steven Levitt
Steven Levitt
Steven David "Steve" Levitt is an American economist known for his work in the field of crime, in particular on the link between legalized abortion and crime rates. Winner of the 2004 John Bates Clark Medal, he is currently the William B...
for its honesty.
Cultural, economic and social considerations
Das Gupta observed that the preference for boys and the resulting shortage of girls was even more pronounced in the more highly developed HaryanaHaryana
Haryana is a state in India. Historically, it has been a part of the Kuru region in North India. The name Haryana is found mentioned in the 12th century AD by the apabhramsha writer Vibudh Shridhar . It is bordered by Punjab and Himachal Pradesh to the north, and by Rajasthan to the west and south...
and Punjab
Punjab (India)
Punjab ) is a state in the northwest of the Republic of India, forming part of the larger Punjab region. The state is bordered by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh to the east, Haryana to the south and southeast and Rajasthan to the southwest as well as the Pakistani province of Punjab to the...
regions of India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
than in poorer areas, and also the high prevalence of this prejudice among the more educated and affluent women (mothers) there. Contrary to the conventional wisdom expectations, in India there are more missing women in developed urban areas, than in backward rural regions. The bias against girls is very evident among the relatively highly developed, middle-class dominated nations (Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
, South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
, Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
, Armenia
Armenia
Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
, Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...
, Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
) and the immigrant Asian communities in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. Only recently and in some countries (particularly South Korea) have the development and educational campaigns begun to turn the tide, resulting in more normal gender ratios.
According to Das Gupta's research done in Punjab in the 1980s, girls were not receiving inferior treatment if a girl was born as a first child in a given family, when the parents still had high hopes for obtaining a son later. Subsequent births of girls were however unwelcome, because each such birth diminished a chance of the family having a son. The more affluent and educated women would have fewer offspring, and therefore were under more acute pressure to produce a son as early as possible. As ultrasound imaging and other techniques increasingly allow early prediction of the child's sex, the more affluent families opt for an abortion, or if a girl is born, decrease her chance of survival by, for example, not providing sufficient medical care.
One reason for parents, even mothers, to avoid daughters is the traditional patriarchal culture in the countries where the elimination of females takes place. As parents grow older they can expect much more help and support from their independent sons, than from daughters, who after getting married become in a sense property of their husbands' families, and, even if educated and generating significant income, have limited ability to interact with their natal families. Women are also often practically unable to inherit real estate, so a mother-widow will lose her family's (in reality her late husband's) plot of land and become indigent if she had had only daughters. Poor rural families have meager resources to distribute among their children, which reduces the opportunity to discriminate against girls.
Further developments
Some research has also noted that in the mid-1990s a reverse began in the observed trends in the regions of Asia where originally the male/female ratios were high. In line with the studies of Das Gupta described above, as income increases the bias in the sex ratio towards boys decreases.With high per capita income growth in many parts of India and China during the late 1990s and the 2000s, male/female ratios have began shifting towards "normal" levels. However, for India and China, this appears to be due to a fall in adult female mortality rates, relative to male adults, rather than a change in the sex ratio among children and newborns.
A different development occurred in South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
which in the early 1990s had one of the highest male to female ratios in the world. By 2007 however, South Korea, had a male to female ratio comparable to that found in Western Europe, US and Sub Saharan Africa.
This development characterized both adult ratios as well as the ratios among new births. According to Chung and Das Gupta rapid economic growth and development in South Korea has led to a sweeping change in social attitudes and reduced the preference for sons. Das Gupta, Chung, and Shuzhuo conclude that it is possible that China and India will experience a similar reversal in trend towards normal sex ratio in the near future if their rapid economic development, combined with policies that seek to promote gender equality, continue. This reversal has been interpreted as the latest phase of a more complex cycle called the "sex ratio transition".