Demographic inequality: The boys are wanted, the girls aborted By Isabelle Attané
Le Monde August 2006
Number of men per 100 women
Europe: 92.7
North America (US & Canada): 96.9
Latin America: 97.5
Oceania: 99.5
Africa: 99.8
Asia: 103.9
China: 105.6
India: 102.4
Pakistan: 106.6
Bangladesh: 104.5
Taiwan: 103.8
Indonesia: 100.6
Europe is the most feminine continent; Asia the most masculine.
At birth
Number of boys per 100 girls
China: 117
(Jiangxi & Guangdong: 138)
India: 111
(Punjab: 126
Haryana: 125)
Taiwan: 110
Indonesia*: 106
South Korea: 108
Azerbaijan: 115
Georgia: 118
Armenia: 120
* Infants under one year
Data for 2000
Gender discrimination now affects the demographic balance of some Asian countries, especially China and India, where there are disproportionate numbers of men to women. In some regions the birth ratio is already extreme and is likely to worsen.
When we put the question to an Asian man in his early 30s, he answered, surprised: “What sort of wife would I like? I don’t care. It’s so hard to find anyone these days, I just want a wife.” But in some Asian countries finding a wife is already far from easy. And every year after 2010 an estimated million Chinese men will be unable to marry because there will not be enough eligible women. In some villages in the northern Indian state of Punjab, men have to travel to Rajasthan or as far as Orissa to seek wives.
India and China between them represent 37% of the world’s population: both have a shortage of women. This demographic discrepancy is not receiving the attention it deserves. Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and 1998 Nobel prizewinner, first sounded the alarm in 1990 when he wrote “More Than 100 Million Women are Missing” (1), mainly about China and India. There has been little response to his warning.
Women usually outnumber men as long as both genders are treated equally. If Asia complied with this rule and had the standard slight predominance of females, there would be 90 million more women in the region.
Thirty years ago China, as the flagship of the communist world, was a fervent defender of gender equality. Today it leads the world in demographic discrimination against women, restoring the old hierarchy; this is the other side of China’s economic and social liberalisation. India, the other emerging economic giant, now the world’s seventh industrial nation, also discriminates against women.
China and India, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia, account for 3 billion of Earth’s 6.5 billion people. In these countries, gender-selective abortion, unequal treatment of children, inferior social status and poor sanitary conditions all contribute to a high death rate among female children and adults.
A population’s gender structure depends on the ratio at birth and the death rate for both sexes at each stage of life. When human intervention does not disrupt the natural balance, slightly more boys are born, but a slightly higher death rate among males at each stage of life naturally removes that small surplus. In many Asian countries, social practice thwarts one or other natural law, sometimes both, leading to fewer female births and more female deaths; hence the higher ratio of males. What are the natural rates? Throughout the world boys outnumber girls at birth by a ratio of 105 to 100. Discrepancies are rare: the lowest ratio is in Rwanda (101: 100) and the highest, outside Asia, in Surinam (108:100).
Shift in nature’s balance
In many Asian countries the rate is unnatural, and the biological, genetic and environmental factors usually put forward to explain the discrepancy are insufficient to explain the trend of the past 20-25 years. Until the early 1980s boys and girls were born in normal proportions in China, India, South Korea and Taiwan. Since then an overall fall in the birth rate, combined with a traditional preference for sons, has altered the biological laws.
Technological advances mean that parents can now choose the sex of their children. A woman can have an ultrasound or amniocentesis in the first few months of pregnancy. If she learns that she is carrying a boy she can go home and prepare, but if it is a girl she faces a dilemma: if she keeps the baby, will she have another opportunity to conceive a boy? Will the couple be able to face the rising cost of raising children? Rather than risk failing to produce a son, parents often decide to abort a girl. Consequently, in China, the birth ratio of boys to girls is now 12% above normal levels. In India, it is 6%. In South Korea, after the mid-1990s peak of 115:100, the proportion improved and dropped to 108:100 in 2004.
The trend has recently spread to other parts of Asia. Half the provinces of Vietnam have a birth ratio of 110 boys to 100 girls. In the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the proportion rose sharply after the mid-1990s to reach levels comparable with parts of India and China. But in Russia, Ukraine, Iran and Turkey, the natural balance remains.
In Indonesia, the ratio of male births to female was still normal in 1990; by 2000 it had reached 106.3:100. This creeping masculinisation of society is due to the imbalance at birth, compounded by a massive emigration of women, mostly to Saudi Arabia (2).
Why do men have an advantage over women and why are woman mistreated? Asian societies affected by the trend all share a strong preference for sons, a situation exacerbated by the overall fall in the birth rate. Because of China’s strict birth control policy, the average number of children per woman has fallen from more than five in the early 1970s to less than two today. In India, it is less than three, compared with nearly five 20 years ago. South Korea and Taiwan have birth rates among the lowest in the world, with an average 1.2 children. Parents desperate for a son will do anything to prevent the birth of a girl. Should they already have a girl, they will do anything, including aborting female foetuses, to have a son as well.
The Indian government has promoted small families since the 1960s; the ideal is to have a boy and a girl. The Chinese saying – you need “a boy and a girl to complete the pair” – is gaining acceptance. But most couples want a boy, possibly several, and only one girl.
In Bangladesh and Pakistan, where women still have many more children than in China, Taiwan or Korea, the sex of a baby is rarely known before birth, but discrimination against girls and women is severe. In these countries, as in India, women’s life expectancy is the same, if not lower, than that of men, whereas in the rest of the world women have a natural advantage.
It is common to neglect daughters, and often fatal; sons are well nurtured, fed first, tended when sick, and vaccinated. This helps explain the inequality in death rates and particularly infant mortality. In India, the death rate for infants and children up to five is 7% higher for girls than for boys. In Pakistan the figure is 5% and in Bangladesh 3%. Interestingly, in Muslim countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Mauritania, which have a similar level of development, the mortality rate for boys under five is a few percentage points higher than girls, based on the common standard (3). The discrepancy is greatest in China, where the mortality of girls is 28% higher than that of boys.
Sex-selective abortions and negligent treatment of girls are the main reasons that so many women are missing. Other discrimination, including female infanticide, contributes far less. The practices are the direct result of women’s inferior social status, attributable to patriarchal systems, patrilineal families, arranged marriages and a socialising process that encourages women to be submissive to their husbands and in-laws. A son is necessary to provide for the family, perpetuate its name and ensure its social and biological continuity.
‘Water your neighbour’s garden’
In China, Taiwan and South Korea, the lack of a male heir means the extinction of the family lineage and the cult of its ancestors. In Hinduism, the souls of parents without sons are condemned to eternal wandering, since the son traditionally carries out the funeral rites at their deaths. In India, as in China, a daughter merely passes through her parents’ home; when she marries she devotes herself to her in-laws and no longer has any obligations to her parents. In the Chinese countryside, where there are no old age pensions, everyone knows it is necessary to “raise a son to prepare for old age”. According to a Chinese saying, to raise a daughter is “to cultivate another man’s field”; in India, it is “watering a neighbour’s garden”.
Discrimination has much to do with social, economic and religious status. In India, the less-educated and poorer segments of society practice prenatal selection. Women’s autonomy is also a determining factor: more independent women resort to sex-selective abortion. In China, younger and better-educated women, especially in cities, systematically practice prenatal selection.
This does not mean that the rest of the population spares its girls. Far from it. In China and India, preserving a family’s economic heritage or means of production, usually land, is crucial to the decision to have a son. The decollectivisation of agriculture in China in the 1980s (4), combined with a patrilineal system of inheritance, made farmers prefer sons. In India, the recent inflation in dowries is a financial burden on families and a prime reason for not bearing daughters. Even affluent families regard a daughter as bad luck: when she marries, part of the family fortune will have to be handed over to her in-laws as dowry, whereas a son’s marriage means a cash bonus. “If you have three daughters, you’re ruined; if you have three sons, you’re saved.”
Religion also influences a couple’s preference for a son and may be a determining factor in sex-selective abortion. South Korea’s population is 47% Buddhist, 37% Protestant and 14% Catholic. Buddhism is more compatible with Confucian values that favour sons, unlike Catholicism or Protestantism. It is also more tolerant towards abortion, which may be a factor. Indian Muslims and Christians do not discriminate much between the sexes and have a normal ratio of male children; Hindus, Sikhs and Jains are more likely to practice sex-selective abortion.
The demographic implications of all this are immense because of the size of populations involved. The first results will be felt around 2015, when huge numbers of men reaching marriageable age will be unable to find a wife. The imbalance in the Chinese marriage market will worsen after 2010, and by 2030 there will be a 20% surplus of men – every year 1.6 million will be unable to find wives. Initially, the marriage market will regulate itself. Men may first turn to younger partners and then to women not previously coveted. Widows will be in demand, which may finally end the taboos against remarriage, as will divorcees, who are becoming more numerous. Suitors will have to be patient in their search and will be older at the age of marriage. In the longer term, men may be forced into celibacy and have to abandon the idea of an heir, a break with the tradition of family lineage that provoked selection for sons.
Wife trafficking
To meet the demand for wives, trans-national networks are forming, especially in China. At the Sino-Vietnamese border there is a boom in women migrating to China to marry. There are several reasons for this. There is a particular shortage of women in the southern provinces of China, and dowry inflation and rising marriage costs since the economic reforms of the 1980s mean that buying a wife is now the only way many poor Chinese families can afford to marry off a son. This in turn fits the economic strategies of poor Vietnamese women, who hope to improve their lives by marrying a Chinese.
Marriage migration is also increasing in Taiwan, where nearly 8% of weddings in 2000 were between a Vietnamese woman and a Taiwanese man. Since the mid-1990s Vietnam has supplied wives to several hundred thousand Taiwanese men: most sought a stable union with someone who would respect their traditional values and be less likely than a Taiwanese woman to demand independence.
Wife trafficking in China is a growth industry. Buyers are usually poor, uneducated farmers, who find this way easier and cheaper than going through the normal procedures. The regions where the traffic is heaviest are lax and corrupt. In some villages marriage registrars have set up a simplified procedure that enables the buyer to register his marriage officially, for a price, and to obtain a certificate stating that he has married the wife he purchased. A young Chinese woman, found by the police after being kidnapped and sold, demanded to be returned to her family. But her husband/owner protested that they were legally married and that he had the licence to prove it: “So what? I may have bought her, but we are legally man and wife.”
Will the scarcity of women improve their situation? There is no sign of it. In China and India, women are being merchandised, turned into consumer goods. Far from increasing their symbolic value, and therefore the way they are perceived, economic liberalisation and missing women seem to have exacerbated the situation and made them chattels. The current economic reforms in China have increased the market value of women, but the way they are treated has worsened, especially in the countryside.
Being rare does not mean being more valued. A film, Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women, made in 2005 by Indian director Manish Jha, illustrates this. It is set in a future rural India where the female population has been greatly reduced through infanticide. A man, Ramcharan, wants to marry off his five sons. A poor peasant who lives nearby is desperate to hold on to his most precious “possession”, his beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Kalki. Ramcharan finds out about Kalki through a friend and buys her for gold to give to his eldest son. Once the wedding is over, she becomes the object of desire for all the brothers and the father. Later she is chained in the stable as a sexual slave to the whole village; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a girl. The film is more a fantasy than a projection of reality, but suggests some potential scenarios in a society deprived of half its population.
Asian governments are aware of the gravity of the situation and have made political attempts at solutions. In India, the Prenatal Diagnosis Techniques Act of 1994 makes it illegal to reveal the sex of an unborn child. Despite the threat of imprisonment and fines, the law is constantly broken. In China, several laws passed in the 1990s forbid ill-treatment of and discrimination against girls, as well as prenatal selection. Because of wide-scale corruption, however, sex-selective abortion continues. A “care for girls” campaign launched in 2001 sought to promote equality of the genders, particularly in text books, and to improve the living conditions of daughter-only families. In some regions, couples benefit from special funds and are exempt from farm taxes and school fees for their daughters until they reach marriageable age. The government has also set up a programme aiming to bring the male birth ratio to normal levels by 2010.
Laws are not enough. Patriarchal values are so deep-rooted that even though many women realise that girls remain closer to their mothers than sons and take better care of their parents in old age, they still prefer sons. It may take several generations, and an improvement in the status of women, before couples become indifferent to their children’s gender. There is hope that the laws in place will succeed in reversing the trend rapidly, as has already happened in South Korea, where young couples observe patriarchal values less than before and are less likely to conform to traditional sexist behaviour.
The story of future generations of women has yet to be written. If things continue at the present rate, several million women will go missing every decade and the repercussions will be enormous. Fewer women means fewer children, and still fewer girls for future generations. That implies a rapid fall in demographic growth in those countries that are most heavily populated today.
We are getting closer to fiction as envisaged by Amin Maalouf in his book The First Century After Beatrice (5), in which he speculates that if couples were able, by simple means, to chose the sex of their children, some communities would choose boys only. They would cease to reproduce and therefore ultimately disappear. Maalouf wrote that the cult of the male might be a social flaw today “but tomorrow it would become collective suicide” and we would witness the “autogenocide of misogynistic peoples”.
Translated by Krystyna Horko
Isabelle Attané, a demographer, sinologist and head of research at the Institut National d‘Etudes Démographiques, Paris, is the author of ‘Une Chine sans femmes?’ (Perrin, Paris, 2005)
(1) Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women are Missing”, New York Review of Books, 20 December 1990.
(2) Another cause is the high death rate among women of childbearing age. Women may also not be registered in censuses. The discrepancy of genders at birth is only fourth place.
(3) According to the indicator used by the United Nations Development Programme.
(4) The first fundamental reform launched by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s was the decollectivisation of agriculture, which restored the peasants’ right to keep the benefits of their land.
(5) Abacus, London, 1994.
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