
Case of the Missing Women - rfreytag
https://numbersofindia.github.io/stories/population-06-2019/#ckpt2
======
lota-putty
Make all Indian women more independent and self-reliant.

\- They often don't have a say in choosing a life-partner \- They're often
don't have a say in pursuing higher studies

Public(free) health/education is utmost importance. Even most Govt. primary
school teachers send their kids to private schools, others don't have private
schools near by.

These issues are not black/white like most microbial diseases.

India is a democracy; democracies are flawed coz, like everywhere else power
attracts corrupt people; and corrupt fight bloody.

Does health of NGOs in a country and their ability to influence Govt. policies
within a term(4-5yrs) tells us more about a Country?

~~~
whenanother
this is a hit piece. it is likely that they either manipulated the time period
in which the data was taken or they cherry picked the towns the took the data
from. most likely they did both. with a population of over a billion. it is
easy to manipulate population numbers. what they did is find towns with only
one or two births for a given time period and selected a time period that
would push their narrative.

the other possibility is that these towns have some messed laws that
encourages people to not register their daughter’s birth. this is an issue in
many countries and people just ignore these rules and just register their kids
in the most beneficial way. of course racist people will take this and claim
misogyny.

there is a logical disconnect of people stereotyping countries with the
largest population as mistreating females. the lack of critical thinking is
appalling. it takes nearly a year to birth a child and requires that the
female is a willing participant. they have done this more times in india than
in most other countries.

~~~
em-bee
manipulated numbers to what end? you think the gender disparity is not real?
china has the same disparity. you can find it in official reports by the
chinese government. so it's real, all right. why would india not have the same
problem? do you have evidence for your claim?

------
yread
There was some discussion about this issue 10 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=651028)

------
billfruit
I see some problems in India with the allocation of seats in the upper house
of the parliament split unequally among the states, unlike the senate in the
USA. That means states with more population have a bigger say, rather than
having all states having an equal say.

~~~
dragonwriter
“Fails to be as anti-democratic as the remaining remnant of the US
Constitutional design to protect slavery” is an odd _criticism_ of another
government’s structure...but okay.

------
FearNotDaniel
The tone of this article makes my skin crawl. It reads as if the author
believes women are possessions that every man is entitled to own. Can we all
start treating female humans as humans please, that is the only way that the
root cause of this kind of problem will ever be eliminated.

~~~
nuwandavek
Hey! I'm the author of this article. I completely understand this criticism. I
was very afraid of how this might come across. My sincere apologies for this.
My intention was to highlight the effect skewed sex-ratios have on the
population, as an aggregate. I abhor the thought of men acting entitled to
women, and being treated as possessions. But I also wanted to highlight the
impact that is already being felt in countries such as china where 'family
life' is taught to be a 'truth' that every human must go through. Sorry again!

Some articles that got me thinking :
[https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f...](https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f346)

[https://www.economist.com/special-
report/2017/11/23/a-distor...](https://www.economist.com/special-
report/2017/11/23/a-distorted-sex-ratio-is-playing-havoc-with-marriage-in-
china)

~~~
kixiQu
It has to be possible to talk about the effects of this phenomenon on all
people, as well as the related changes in behavior people choose. We're all
new to that, so I think we're all figuring out what language is appropriate.
So we all have to be open to discussing that too. Thanks for that openness!

------
mlang23
"eroding the next generation's pool of women"

What a way to phrase things. I really wonder how this article is relevant to
HN?

~~~
nuwandavek
Hey! I'm the author of this article. I apologise for that particular phrasing.
I sincerely meant it as a pool of men, pool of women kinda way. I was trying
to be dispassionate about it, which may have come across as insensitive.
Apologies. I was trying to base my tone on these articles that got me thinking
Economist's analysis of marriage in China :
[https://www.economist.com/special-
report/2017/11/23/a-distor...](https://www.economist.com/special-
report/2017/11/23/a-distorted-sex-ratio-is-playing-havoc-with-marriage-in-
china)

FT's article on 'missing brides' :
[https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f...](https://www.ft.com/content/d44122c0-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f346)

------
linuxftw
It's just people reacting to market conditions. If your society provides
incentives for abortion, abortion is going to happen.

I can't judge people living in other parts of the world. But I know that
massive populations ruled by a single government don't work. There's no reason
1/6 of the world should be under the control of a single government. They need
to decentralize and maybe create a federation of independent states.

------
RaSoJo
I have a pet (non-scientific) theory/query. Wouldn't such prolonged &
sustained periods of female foeticide eventually cause the human body to
mutate...and stop giving birth to the female sex entirely?

~~~
nordsieck
> I have a pet (non-scientific) theory/query. Wouldn't such prolonged &
> sustained periods of female foeticide eventually cause the human body to
> mutate...and stop giving birth to the female sex entirely?

It's the opposite, actually.

It is evolutionarily favorable to give birth to the sex that is less numerous
at sexual maturity. If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the
chance the average baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of
sexually mature females to males balanced out.

Incidentally, this is presumably why there are slightly more males born than
females [1] - males tend to die more frequently than females during childhood.

___

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio)

> In humans, the natural ratio between males and females at birth is slightly
> biased towards the male sex, being estimated to be about 1.05[2] or 1.06[3]
> males/per female born.

~~~
claudiawerner
>If female babies started dying, for whatever reason, the chance the average
baby is female would gradually increase until the ratio of sexually mature
females to males balanced out.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does the human body have internal
knowledge of the current gender ratio in society such that it will attempt to
fix the ratio to balance?

~~~
nordsieck
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does the human body have internal
> knowledge of the current gender ratio in society such that it will attempt
> to fix the ratio to balance?

It doesn't.

This process happens strictly through natural selection.

If average female fertility is F, the number of sexually mature females is f
and the number of sexually mature males is m, then the average male fertility
is F * f / m (each child is conceived by exactly one male and one female).
This means that the less numerous sex has a higher fertility.

It is not true that each child is equally likely to be male or female. Some
parents are more predisposed to have male children and some parents are more
predisposed to have female children. The parents predisposed to have more
reproductively successful children will have their genes flourish - pushing
the sex balance of new babies slightly in the corrective direction.

