Too Few Women Could Lead to Big Trouble in China
In the course of trying to find the source material for the blurbs I found about gender-imbalance in Asia, I came across many articles about the subject ... spanning the last two decades! Apparently, this is not a new issue in Asia.
The problem was mentioned way back in 1991, when there were smaller discrepancies between male and female births, but even then, the fear was a larger imbalance between male and female population leading to, at the very least, a man’s inability to find a wife! (On the other hand, in the woman's favor, they would all be guaranteed a husband, no matter what!)
On the face of it, it doesn’t sound like a very large discrepancy: In China, for every 100 girls born, there are 130 boys born. Doesn’t sound too bad right? But when you ratchet up that number to 1000 girls, even, that means 1300 boys, or 300 men who may be lifelong bachelors. The fear is that single men left at loose ends with no families may lead to more violence, sex crimes and psychological disturbances.
In a 1991 report by Population and Development Review, the reasons for imbalance were threefold: obviously, more boys than girls were being born in the first place, migration-causing “gains and losses,” and sadly, mortality, which was directly impacted at that time and earlier by poorer medical care for women. Male/female ratios evolve from the study of birth rates, migration patterns and death rates. More males might’ve been born, but women were outliving men, meaning the ratio was sort of fixed on the other end of life. But when women receive poorer care and begin dying sooner as a result, men begin outliving the women, firmly cementing the imbalance. Once this health care issue was addressed in the latter part of the 20th century, women tended to outlive men, but the discrepancy of more men than women still lingered.
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