Case of the Missing Women

[Edit : This article was trending on the homepage of hackernews on the week of its release. One of the criticisms was about the tone of this section, especially because it might seem like I'm indicating that women 'owe it' to men to marry them. I completely understand this criticism and my intention couldn't be further from it. My motivation was to highlight the effect skewed sex-ratios have on the population, as an aggregate. I abhor the thought of men acting entitled to women, and women being treated as possessions. I simply wanted to highlight the impact of sex-selection that is already being felt in countries such as China where 'family life' is taught to be a 'truth' that every human must go through. I apologise if I have offended anyone's sensibilities and shall strive to do better. :) ]

We all remember reading about the evils of female foeticide and infanticide in our school social studies text books. What happened to that? Have we solved that issue and is there an way to quantify the harm? The first number that jumps at us is the sex ratio of a country. India has ~8% more males than females with a sexratio of 926 females for every 1000 males. Given probability at birth is nearly 50%, we expect the sexratio to be 1 female per male. Sexratio of Indian States varies between 879 of Haryana and 1084 of Kerala. The visualization above indicates number of women per 100 men, in each state. Apart from a few states, most have sexratios above 900. Yay, we've hit 90%! Woohoo. Isn't this good? Unfortunately not.



When we look at percentages, we often forget that the actual number of people is millions multiplied by that percentage. A more intuitive number is to calculate additional males, overall. Each circle below represents 100k "extra males".

We currently have around 35 Mil 'extra men'. This number is staggering. India is a country where marriage is an obvious way of life (I'm discounting LGBTQ marriages in the event they become legal, as it most likely won't have much of an effect on the proportions, although it'll bring down absolute numbers). By Indian culture standards, growing a family is an essential piece of an individual's life. This crisis is already playing out in several parts of China. Chinese men actively seek out partners from other countries, often saving up large sums of money for this singular purpose.



Also interestingly, studies show that the proportion of marriageable women does not remain constant, even if sex-ratio is constant. Older men save up and end up marrying younger women eroding the next generation's pool of women. So, the deficit keeps growing far into the future. There is active research into the societal implications of millions of 'barren' men in a population. Though the findings are not universally accepted, there is evidence to believe that there will be perceptible increase in crime and violence. Imagine millions of men, with barely enough jobs and no conceivable prospect of marriage or family, the one thing they know to be central to the Indian way of life. I hope you look slightly worried. Kerala to the rescue ❤️?



