Explaining the Explanations of 100 Million Missing Women - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 216

Chapter 12
Explaining the Explanations of 100 Million
Missing Women
Hsiang-Ke Chao and Szu-Ting Chen
Abstract This chapter studies the methodology in the missing-women debate
among economists and biologists. One of the central philosophical and methodo-
logical issues at stake in the missing-women debate is natural and social scientists'
attempts for discovering the underlying causal structures and mechanisms.
Although they encounter the same problem of inferring the mechanism and causal
structure in face of available data, the discovering strategies vary. In this chapter,
we will comparatively study the strategies of discovering causes and mechanisms in
the case of missing women.
1 Amartya Sen's Missing Women
Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen opened his 1990 New York Review of Books
article, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” with the following
sentences:
It is often said that women make up a majority of the world's population. They do not. This
mistaken belief is based on generalizing from the contemporary situation in Europe and
North America, where the ratio of women to men is typically around 1.05 or 1.06, or higher.
In South Asia, West Asia, and China, the ratio of women to men can be as low as 0.94, or
even lower, and it varies widely elsewhere in Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America. How
can we understand and explain these differences, and react to them?
H.-K. Chao ( * )
Department of Economics, National Tsing Hua University,
101, Section 2, Kuang Fu Road, 30013 Hsinchu, Taiwan
e-mail: [e-mail]
S.-T. Chen
Graduate Institute of Philosophy, National Tsing Hua University,
101, Section 2, Kuang Fu Road, 30013 Hsinchu, Taiwan
e-mail: [e-mail]