Gendercide: the worldwide war on baby girls

Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

The Economist print edition, March 2010

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearthof young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace. The number is based on the sexualdiscrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America with little prospect of marriage, not attached to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintendedconsequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China. Parts of India have male/femaleratios as distorted as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. Former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans have been followingsuit since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer and a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between a discernible son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatalsex-determination technology and decliningfertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things. That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. According to CASS the sexratio in China today is 123 boys per 100 girls. As CASS says, “the genderimbalance has been growing wider year after year.” These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

South Korea is experiencing some surprising consequences of similar gender imbalance. The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from abroad. In 2008, 11% of marriages were “mixed”, mostly between a Korean man and a foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto homogeneous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed marriages. The trend is especially marked in rural areas, where the government thinks half the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. The children have produced a new word: “Kosians”, or Korean-Asians.

Conventional wisdom about such sexualdisparities is that they are the result of “backwardthinking” in old-fashioned societies or—in China—of the one-child policy. By implication, reforming the policy or modernising the society (by, for example, enhancingthestatus of women) should bring the sex ratio back to normal. But this is not always true and, where it is, the road to normal sex ratios is winding and bumpy.

Not all traditional societies show a discernible preference for sons over daughters. But in those that do—especially those in which the family line passes through the son and in which he is supposed to look after his parents in old age—a son is worth more than a daughter. A girl is deemed to have joined her husband’s family on marriage, and is lost to her parents. As a Hindu saying puts it, “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”

Until the 1980s people in poor countries could do little about their son preference: before birth, nature took its course. But in that decade, ultrasound scanning and other methods of detecting the sex of a child before birth began to make their appearance. These technologies changed everything. Doctors in India started advertising ultrasound scans with the slogan “Pay 5,000 rupees ($110) today and save 50,000 rupees tomorrow” (the saving was on the cost of a daughter’s dowry). The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread.

Sexual disparities tend to rise with income and education, which you would not expect if “backward thinking” was all that mattered. In India, some of the most prosperous states—Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat—have the worst sex ratios. In China, the higher a province’s literacy rate, the more skewed its sex ratio. The ratio also rises with income per head. Modernisation and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a son. If you have only one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son’s expense. So, with rising incomes and fallingfertility, more and more people live in the smaller, richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.