Missing women--revisited

doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7427.1297

BMJ 2003;327:1297-1298 (6 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7427.1297

Editorial

Missing women—revisited

Reduction in female mortality has been counterbalanced by sexselective abortions

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The concept of "missing women," which was presented in an editorialI wrote in this journal 11 years ago, refers to the terribledeficit of women in substantial parts of Asia and north Africa,which arises from sex bias in relative care.¹ The numbers arevery large indeed. For example, using as the standard for comparisonthe female:male ratio of 1.022 observed in sub-Saharan Africa(since women in that region receive less biased treatment),I found the number of missing women in China to be 44m, in India37m, and so on, with a total that easily exceeded 100m worldwide,a decade or so ago. Others used different methods and got somewhatdifferent numbers—but all very large (for example, StephanKlasen's sophisticated demographic model yielded 89m for thecountries in question).²

How have things moved more recently? At one level they havenot changed much. The ratio of women to . . . [Full text of this article]

Amartya Sen, master of Trinity College

Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ

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