Missing-women puzzle

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, HIVS/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.

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