The very first anecdote has the women committing a particularly vicious killing (and being acquitted!) of an innocent woman because her dowry (which benefited the killers) was considered inadequate so there are some pretty powerful cultural forces at work here that are very difficult to grasp for the average HN reader. China also has a different sort of problem with a worse gender imbalance, giving us two terrible test cases from an outsider's point of view.
