CityReads │ Where Have the Women Gone
Using data from five censuses, we estimate the numbers of missing women in China from the period 1900–2000 were about 31.78--35.59 million, accounting for 4.2-4.7% of expected female population.
Jiang, et al., 2012. Estimates of Missing Women in Twentieth Century China, Contin Chang. 27(3): doi:10.1017/S0268416012000240.NIH
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830941/pdf/nihms513861.pdf
Sen,A. More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990.
Source:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/dec/20/more-than-100-million-women-are-missing/
Cover Picture:http://pop.org/content/sex-selective-abortion
In his piece, More Than 100 Million Women Missing at the New York Review of Books on December 20, 1990, Amartya Sen first coined the term “missing women”. He estimated the number of “missing women” in a country by calculating the number of extra women who would have been if these countries had the same ratio of women to men as obtain in areas of the world in which they receive similar care. In China alone this amounts to 50 million “missing women,” taking 105 as the benchmark ratio. When that number is added to those in South Asia, West Asia, and North Africa, a great many more than 100 million women are “missing.” These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women.
There are two sets of ‘missing women’: those who go missing before birth and also those who are ‘lost’ after birth. The first set are mainly the result of sex-selective induced abortion, which produces a high sex ratio at birth, while the second set arise from infanticide and the abandonment of female children as well as from the biased treatment of girls’ illnesses leading to excess female infant and child mortality.
Missing women can also be differentiated between ‘nominally’ and ‘truly’ missing women. ‘Truly’ missing refers to females who have disappeared both before and after birth for the reasons just listed. The ‘nominally’ missing includes not only the truly missing but also those who are living but whose births were not registered. The latter are ‘falsely missing’ from the statistics.
The phenomenon of “missing women” is prevalent in many Asian countries. Estimates for the 1990s show that in India alone there were 39.1 million missing females, comprising 7.9 per cent of the expected number of women in the absence of such a phenomenon. In Pakistan the number was 4.9 million, accounting for 7.8 per cent of the expected number of women; and in Bangladesh, 3.7 million, about 6.9 percent.
There have always been missing women throughout Chinese history. Certainly, infanticide and abandonment of female children were both prevalent before 1950. In the late nineteenth century, a missionary questioned 40 women aged fifty or above. Together they had given birth to 183 sons and 175 daughters, but while 126 of the sons survived to age ten only 53 of the daughters did so. The women admitted to killing 78 of their female children. Female infanticide, mainly driven by a strong preference for sons due to Chinese patriarchal intuitions, became more prevalent when resources such as food and money were limited, as a means of making sure that boys would receive relatively more resources and thus havebetter chances of survival. In the first half of the twentieth century, wars and famines meant families felt compelled to allocate their limited resources to their sons, which resulted in higher than normal mortality of female children and a higher proportion of missing females.
Since 1980, China’s low fertility, resulting from both rapid socio-economic change and strict birth control policies, has driven the sex ratio at birth to increase continuously. The reduced number of children, mandated by fertility control policies, entails a lower probability of having a son and leads people to turn to sex selective abortion to ensure the birth of at least one son when the sex and number of children are in conflict. In the 1982 census, China’s sex ratio at birth was 108.5 males per 100 females, and this rose to 111.3 in the 1990 census, and worsened further to 116.9 in the 2000 census and to 118.1 in the 2010 census.
This paper thus aims to estimate the numbers of and trends in China’s missing women over the twentieth century.
Methods to estimate the number and percentage of missing women can be generally divided into two kinds. One method is to use the sex ratio of the total population, or what we call the “overall-sex-ratio” approach. Applying the sex ratio of a chosen benchmark population to the number of men in a population under investigation in a given year, the expected number of women in the study population can be estimated. The difference between the women expected and the women alive in the observed population provides the number of missing women.
An alternative method of estimating the missing women is to study the missing women in individual cohorts, using census data, in what we call a “cohort-sex-ratio” approach.
First, they assumed that the sex ratio at birth and the survival status of men and women of each birth cohort are ‘normal’under a certain life expectancy, and then estimate the expected sex ratio of each cohort in each census to estimate the proportion of missing women in different census times for the same birth cohort, or estimate the expected sex ratio of each birth cohort in the corresponding (usually the nearest census) census. Second, they calculate the expected female population according to the number of surviving men in each census and the sex ratio assumed to apply, and then estimate the number and percentage of the missing women for each birth cohort.
We use the cohort-sex-ratio approach to estimate the missing women in twentieth century China using data from the 1953, 1964, 1982, 1990, and 2000 censuses. We define the percentage of missing women as the ratio between the missing female population and the expected female population.
We divide the twentieth century into four periods: the late Qing Empire period (1900–1910), the Republic of China period (1911–1949), the Orthodox Communist period (1950–1979), and the Economic Reform period (1980–2000)
Figure 1 indicates that the percentage of missing Chinese women varies greatly over the twentieth century. Before 1949, the overall percentage of missing women was relatively high (generally above 6 percent). In the 1900s, the percentage remained relatively stable, until around 1910, that is, at the end of Qing Empire and the Republican Revolution, when the percentage rose to a local peak of around 11 percent, after which it declined until 1920.Thereafter the percentage of missing women generally tended to rise until the late 1930s, that is, at the beginning of the war against the Japanese, it reached its highest value for the twentieth century of around 14 percent, and then began to steadily decline.
After 1949,although the percentage of missing women fluctuated, it remained generally below 4 percent until the late 1970s. Between 1950 and 1980, there are two local peaks on the graph: one is during the Great Famine in the late 1950s when around 5 percent of women are estimated to have been missing and the other is during the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1960s when approximately 3 percent of women were missing.
Since the early 1980s, with the implementation of the economic reform and strict birth control program, the percentage of missing women has been continuously increasing, although the peak value in 2000 is, at just over 7 percent, still much lower than the maximum for the twentieth century.
Figure 1 Percentage of missing women by birth cohorts
in corresponding census during 1900–2000
Table 1 Number and percentage of missing women during the
twentieth century, by period (in thousands)
It is important that throughout the twentieth century in China, all the peak years in terms of the percentage of missing women, shown in Figure 1, corresponded roughly to the occurrence of political and social turmoil or to periods during which family resources were relatively scarce: the Republican Revolution (1910), the Japanese invasion (1937), the Great Famine (1959), the Cultural Revolution (1966), and after the implementation of the strict birth control policy (1980) which actually restricted the number of children for families.
Thus, discrimination against females, as a reflection of the patriarchal and patrilineal systems in China, appears to have intensified in these periods of stress on family resources. When families could not meet the needs of all their children and were forced to limit their number, they chose sons over daughters, creating a deficit of young girls. For instance, during the periods of war in the first half of the twentieth century, young men were forced to join the Chinese army, and the common people were required to supply operational rations, they suffered harassment by the warring militias, and had to flee from their hometowns when these came under attack. Wars, as well as famines, resulted in severe resource scarcity and families would allot their limited resources to their sons who were perceived as more useful. Consequently girls were seen as a burden and were more likely to suffer discrimination; abandonment and infanticide of female children became widespread, and their mortality rate was also higher than normal during these periods. Such phenomena were seen not only in China, but also in India and South Korea.
However, since the mid 1980s, the main approach used by Chinese couples to achieve the desired gender configuration amongst their children has changed from the infanticide and abandonment of female children used in the first half of the century to sex-selective induced abortion aided by new technology.
The “missing girls” phenomenon is causally linked to enforcement of the One Child Policy. Fertility is lower and sex ratios are higher among those under stricter fertility control. Sex ratios in urban area are higher than those in rural areas.
Figure2 Rising sex ratio among first birth in China
Source: Ebenstein,2010
Figure3 Sex ratio at birth by urban and rural areas
Using the assumptions of life expectancy laid out in scenario 1 in Table 2, the estimated total number of females ‘missing’ from China across the twentieth century from the birth cohorts between 1900 and 2000 is 35.59 million, representing 4.65 per cent of the expected females in the corresponding census. However, if life expectancy is assumed to increase linearly every ten years between 1900 and 1939 (that is scenario 2 in Table 2), rather than remained stable, then the number of missing women would decrease to 31.78 million and the percentage also declines to 4.17 percent.
Table2 Estimated female life expectancies at birth (Years)
Women are missing--aborted, killed, neglected to death.The phenomenon of missing women indicates that females in China suffer from discrimination from the moment of conception, inducing a gender imbalance in the Chinese population, which has made China one of the rare countries in the world with more men than women (In Europe and North America, the ratio of women to men is typically around 1.05 or 1.06, or higher). It also causes a male marriage squeeze, especially in poverty-stricken areas. It may potentially engender further social problems impairing the welfare of the overall society and harming the longterm sustainable development of the Chinese population and society.
Table3 Total population and sex ratio, census years during 1953-2010