As early as 1990, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen drew international attention to India’s “missing women”: the millions of girls that should have been born or should have grown up into women, if it weren’t for India’s strong preference for sons. Instead, they were aborted as fetuses, neglected as children or purposefully killed later in life.
As a result, India has a shortage of women, and a surplus of men.
Using data from India’s decennial census, we will highlight some of the main facts, trends and correlations around this phenomenon. The main measurement here is the sex ratio, defined as the number of women per 1,000 men in society. A sex ratio of 1,000 would mean gender parity; any number lower than 1,000 means that there are fewer women than men. The lower the sex ratio, the more women are missing, and the stronger the son preference.
To see previous parts of this project:
Part I: Skewed Sex Ratios: a Long-Term Trend
Part II: Regional Disparities
Part III: What Factors Affect Sex Ratios?
While the stark male surplus in both India and China, the world’s most populous countries, have sparked concerns about women’s rights and safetly, the risk of conflict and increased crime, and future demographic problems, a look at the map the phenomenon of uneven sex ratios is not unique to these two places, or to Asia in general.
2011 Census data: Ministry of Home Affairs, India
Historic sex ratio, historic literacy, poverty, cities: Indiastat
Global sex ratio: World Bank