Missing Women: A Review of the Debates and an Analysis of Recent Trends

Abstract

In a series of papers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Amartya Sen coined the phrase 'missing women' to refer to the number of females that have died as a result of discriminatory treatment in the access to health und nutrition in parts of the developing world. He estimated then that the number of missing women was about 100 million. A subsequent debate has refined these estimates using different demographic techniques. In this paper, we review this debate, provide an update of the number of 'missing women' at the turn of the millennium based on the latest census data and investigate the determinants of current trends in gender bias in mortality. We find that the number of missing women has increased in absolute terms, but fallen as a share of the number of women alive. There have been sizable improvements in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and most countries of the Middle East and North Africa, while there are only small improvements in India and a deterioration in China. We find that the improving female education and employment opportunities has helped to reduce gender bias in most countries while the increasing recourse to sex-selective abor tions has worsened it, particularly in China but increasingly also in India.