Explaining the Explanations of 100 Million Missing Women - Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics - page 218

Based on this work, social scientists conducted research on the socioeconomic
mechanism behind and the causes of the missing women. In Chahnazarian's ( 1988 )
extensive review of the biological and sociodemographic determinants of the sex
ratio at birth, the latter includes factors such as maternal age, paternal age, and birth
order. In addition, economists have investigated the explanatory power of economic
factors such as income and wage. They go even further to study whether and how
son preference is affected by such factors. Sen, for instance, implied that the
anomalous sex ratio may have been caused, and might be cured, by the economic
factor “gainful employment,” defined as the condition of having paid work outside
the household. Women's gainful employment may have an effect on other factors—
such as son preference and women's inequality—and in turn on the sex ratio. 2
Hence, Sen urges policy interventions, such as providing better education for
women, as a cure.
In this chapter, we review the debate about the cause of the missing-women
phenomenon—that is, the debate about whether the phenomenon is caused by
biological or cultural determinants. Our purpose is to show a crucial role that the
conception of causal structure plays in explaining or explaining away the supposed
observation of missing women. It is also argued that the complementary strategy has
been adopted to form a relatively more complete causal structure that can be used to
tell a relatively more complete causal story about the underlying mechanism that is
thought to be responsible for the occurrence of Asian countries' missing women.
2 How Baruch Blumberg Explains His “Strangest Observation”
In biomedical science, researchers attempted to seek different explanations for the
missing women. One example is Baruch S. Blumberg, the 1976 Nobel laureate in
medicine. Blumberg's research focuses on the hepatitis B virus (HBV), which he
discovered in 1965. He observed during his fieldwork in Greece possible
associations between HBV infection and sex ratio (Hesser et al. 1975 ). He later
found similar results in the countries having high HBV prevalence, such as
Greenland, Kar Kar Island, and the Philippines. 3 Specifically, Blumberg found
that “carrier” families, that is, either parent was a chronic carrier who is a person
who tests positive for hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) but does not develop an
antibody against HBsAg (anti-HBs), had a higher sex ratio (i.e., more boys) than did
the families that had no evidence of HBV infection. In contrast, the “antibody”
2 See Qian ( 2008 ) for an empirical study of the relation between women's gainful employment and
sex ratios.
3 Oster ( 2005 , Table 3) summarizes the original data of these micro-studies of offspring sex ratio
by parental HBV infection.