Daily Life

Where have all the females gone?

It's a man's world - more than ever - and that spells doom for the future.


The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto calls the "alarming demographic masculinisation" of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear.


The statistics behind the warnings are grimly compelling.


In India and Vietnam the figure is around 112 boys for every 100 girls. In China it is almost 120 to 100 - and in some places higher than 130.


And the trend is spreading: to regions like the South Caucasus, where Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia all post-birth ratios of more than 115 to 100, and further west to Serbia and Bosnia.


Demographers say that figure is now more than 160 million - women selected out of existence by the convergence of traditional preferences for sons, declining fertility and, most crucially, the prevalence of cheap prenatal sex-determination technology.


"Earlier villagers had to go to the city to get a sonogram (ultrasound)," said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the non-profit Population Foundation of India. "Today sonographers are going into the villages to cater to people who want sons."

Even if the sex ratio at birth returned to normal in India and China within 10 years, Guilmoto says men in both countries would still face a "marriage squeeze" for decades to come.





"High-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonisation or war," they said.

Mara Hvistendahl, a correspondent for Science magazine and author of the recently published Unnatural Selection, says fears of full-scale wars are unfounded, and points out that India remains a thriving democracy, despite its shockingly high gender imbalance.

However she does agree with the underlying premise.

"Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," Hvistendahl stressed.

"Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent," she said, adding that leaders in both China and India have spoken of the threat gender imbalance poses to social stability.


"The data is really limited," said Nobuko Horibe, Asia-Pacific director of the UN Population Fund. "It is very likely that this marriage squeeze would lead to these phenomena ... but it's very anecdotal at this stage."



There is "no silver bullet," admits Guilmoto, who believes the first priority is to make sure the problem is properly publicised - and not just in the developing world.

"In some countries in eastern Europe, people are absolutely not aware of what is going on," he warned.



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