Explaining the Explanations of 100 Million Missing Women - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 217

Sen referred to the observations of exceptionally low female-male population
ratios in certain Asian countries compared with those in Western countries.
Recently, this issue has been referred to in the literature as the “missing-women”
problem. It is a problem, as Sen sees it, because the observations reveal an
abnormality. The normal circumstance would consist of the following elements.
At the outset, the laws of nature suggest that the number of male births is higher
than female births; therefore, the men-women sex ratio at birth should be higher
than unity. 1 But the mortality of males is also higher than that of females, a fact that
is thought to be compensated for by the higher male birth rate—a natural “regu-
latory mechanism” that should result in an actual men-women ratio of unity
(Chahnazarian 1988 , p. 217). This suggests what the observed sex ratio should be
if biological factors were the only ones to affect human reproduction.
However, for Sen, the natural laws are conditional on gender equality; that is,
they are conditional on whether men and women receive similar nutritional and
medical attention and health care. Consequently, when the observed sex ratio
deviates from that which biology would indicate in such a way as to favor the
number of men, then there are missing women, and that calls for explanations and
calculations. Moreover, such a deviation should be attributed to the unequal social
and cultural treatment of women. Sen argues that these sociocultural causes could
be expressed in the single composite factor of son preference , meaning the parental
preference for boys over girls. Sen subsequently concludes that there are 100
million women missing due to the prevalence of son preference in the non-Western
countries—50 million in China alone.
There are some methodological issues concerning Sen's assertion. On the one
hand, there is the question of exactly how many women are missing; on the other
hand, there is the question of the cause of this phenomenon. The answers to these
questions are dependent on each other. To calculate the number of missing women,
we must determine the numbers of males and females in an entire population to
calculate the sex ratio, which in turn is affected by factors that cause either low
birthrates, high mortality rates, or shortened life expectancy of females. Sen thus
provides a possible explanation for the way the factors categorized as son prefer-
ence result in missing women.
Sen's study reflects the long-standing issue of the human sex ratio, which has
been studied since the seventeenth century, when statistical data were first col-
lected. For example, John Graunt ( 1662 ) and John Arbuthnot ( 1710 ) statistically
analyzed the English data and showed that the high male-female sex ratio at birth
(around 105 boys per 100 girls) was not due to chance (Hacking 2006 ). Evolution-
ary theories of sex ratio were developed in the nineteenth century (Sober 2007 ).
These studies provide the foundation for the normal ,or natural , state, in which
nonnatural factors do not intervene with the sex ratio at birth.
1 Sex ratio at birth is also called offspring sex ratio . Throughout this chapter, the sex ratio is defined
as the number of men per women.