Opinion

It’s a man’s man’s man’s world

People who study these things for a living cannot explain why prospective parents — across continents, cultures and centuries — have always preferred boys to girls. But nature agrees: The ratio of live births is usually 105 boys to every 100 girls, because boys have higher rates of infant mortality, engage in high-risk behavior and die sooner. (More boys are born after wars, though science hasn’t yet figured out why.) Men are so expendable that, by age 30, there are equal numbers of males and females in the United States; after age 30, there are always more females.

But what happens if preference leads to manipulation? We’re finding out, in dramatic fashion, in China and India, where decades of sex-selected abortions and infanticides have left a shortfall of about 160 million women — roughly the entire female population of the United States.

Economic and political instability, trade imbalances, “surplus males” who can’t find wives, mass emigration — the reverberations of this decades-long “gendercide,” as it’s come to be known, are only beginning to be felt by these nations. And they will eventually be felt by us.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT STATS ILLUSTRATING HOW THE WORLD’S POPULATION IS SKEWED IN FAVOR OF MEN

“The consequences of 140 boys for every 100 girls are unbelievable,” says Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather. “We’re going to see profound changes in culture that we can’t even begin to predict.”

As Mara Hvistendahl writes in her new book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” (PublicAffairs), China and India make up one-third of the world’s population, and their lopsided sex ratios have already altered the entire world’s. Globally, we’re now at 107 male births per 100 female, a stat she calls “biologically impossible.”

And it’s not even limited to those nations — sex selection is common in Vietnam, Nepal, the Balkans and the Caucasus countries. China and India, however, suffer from the steepest dearth of potential mothers; the rates of kidnapping and sex trafficking are on the rise, with 42,000 women freed by the Chinese police from 2001-2003 alone. Women in these regions are undervalued at birth and overvalued in marriage, and it remains to be seen whether even the most conservative estimate by the UN — that the global gender imbalance can be rectified by 2050 — is remotely realistic.

How did this happen? Author Hvistendahl says that access to ultrasounds and abortions, coupled with cultural mores, aren’t the whole explanation. “Blaming the imbalance on gender discrimination,” she says, “doesn’t explain why it’s occurred.”

Declining fertility rates are a key factor. As education and income levels rose, births went down, and this holds true across all nations. (Highly educated couples, however, are the most likely to sex-select, and the impulse is grounded in one of humanity’s most primal: the desire for status.)

According to Hvistendahl’s book, the average Asian woman had 5.7 children in the late 1960s. By 2006, she had 2.3 — which means today’s Asian mother has a 24% chance of having only girls, unless she somehow intervenes. (After three children, a woman has an 88% chance of having a son; after six, 99%.)

Declining birth rates also coincided with the West’s intervention in the developing world; in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson publicly addressed the global dangers of unchecked population control, and the demographers and scientists of that decade pushed policy prescriptions that would lower birth rates in China and India. These ranged from cheap and easy access to abortion — a bipartisan issue backed by Henry Kissinger and George H.W. Bush — to eugenics-based ideas such as sterilizing certain provinces through the water supply.

While there were geopolitical girders for this thinking — the West feared that overpopulation in this region would result in the unchecked spread of communism — the real fear was the impending humanitarian crisis. “They said that the other [danger] was mass starvation, the likes of which we’d never seen,” Francese says. “They were right. It would’ve been catastrophic.”

Yet as one catastrophe was averted, another was metastasizing. The pressure to have far fewer children increased the importance that those children be male — not just for cultural and religious reasons, but for purely pragmatic ones. India approached the problem by increasing access to sex education, birth control and abortion, and working to rapidly advance urbanization. With the West’s encouragement, China eventually adopted a one-child-per-family quota, to devastating effect.

“When you have no Social Security, men are capable of earning much more money in those cultures,” says Francese. “And it is an ironclad, absolute obligation in Chinese and Indian cultures that the son takes care of parents when they’re old.”

Daughters, however, are an economic liability: Families can and do go bankrupt paying dowries, and once a daughter is married, she and her future children are absorbed into her groom’s family of origin. “As soon as a woman is married in either of those cultures, she’s gone,” Francese says. “She’s no longer a member of the family. The boss in that scenario is the groom’s mother. Who is often a complete bitch.”

And so gruesome scenes like the one described in Hvistendahl’s book became common: The young medical student on rotation in a hospital in Delhi in 1978, a facility so poor that stray dogs and cats freely roamed the hallways. The obstetric student, Puneet Bedi, was called to the labor and delivery room, but instead of performing a live birth, he found a 6-month-old aborted fetus on a surgical tray table. A wild cat strode by, another dead fetus in its mouth — feral, unthinkable, yet utterly unremarkable to everyone else on staff. Bedi asked a nurse why no one stopped the cat from eating the fetus, and, according to the book, was told, “Because it was a girl.”

In 2010, the Chinese writer Xinran Xue told The Economist that she’d once been visiting a peasant family, in another room, as the wife was giving birth. She was startled when the moans stopped and she heard a man yell, “Useless thing!” By the time Xinran made it to the bedroom door, she saw an infant’s foot poking above the garbage pail, where the father had tossed the baby, left to suffocate to death. Xinran was horrified. An older woman in the house was unfazed. “Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son,” she said. “Girl babies don’t count.”

Increasing access to medical technology has at least helped reduce late-term abortions, yet the West still indirectly contributes to the gender imbalance it seeks to correct. According to Hvistendahl, after GE saw a drop in market share in China three years ago, they created a super-cheap, easily transportable ultrasound machine that would be affordable even in the poorest provinces. GE took a similar approach in India in 2006, and sex-selected abortions there, too, have spread to impoverished rural areas.

A new study, released two weeks ago in medical journal The Lancet, revealed that at least 600,000 girls are purposely aborted in India per year, and though the government banned sex-selected terminations in 1996, fines can’t compete with the bribes. The practice is now illegal in China too, but a carton of cigarettes there is enough to get an ultrasound.

It makes sense, then, that the Chinese and Indian governments have sought to encourage the birth of baby girls. In Fujian province, couples who have only two girls would get a $150 annual pension for life, along with beneficial access to health care, employment and housing. Their daughters will be educated for free. In 2008, the Indian government announced that it would pay the parents of girls $5,000 in cash and benefits if their daughters complete school and remain unmarried at 18.

“This will force the families to look upon the girl as an asset, rather than a liability,” Renuka Chowdhury, India’s minister of women and child development, said at the time.

Quite the optimistic, encouraging statement an oppressed group yearns to hear. Yet it’s precisely due to decades of such economic, cultural and literal devaluation that mean women will, in the long term, emerge with substantially more leverage than men. Dowries in some provinces of India have already been abolished; it’s possible that, in the near future, men will be paying hefty dowries to women.

“Economists used to speculate that when the supply of women goes down, their value goes up,” says author Hvistendahl. “Like with oil.”

Demographer Francese agrees. “The whole concept of the dowry will disappear,” he says. “It was introduced because girls had to get married.” He also foresees a time when women may have two husbands and two families in two separate households.

Prostitution, he thinks, will become legal — which can be an economic boon for some women but will keep them downwardly mobile. It remains common for desperate men to kidnap women and force them to marry. The US may see a serious influx of young Indian men immigrating, while 10-20 million young Chinese men will likely migrate to Latin America and Africa, where the Chinese government is investing in natural resource extraction.

Still, even if China and India are able to redress the balance by 2050, that’s four intervening decades of millions more men than women, in cultures where getting married and having a family is paramount. What might that look like? Hvistendahl says that parallels can be found in, of all places, 19th-century America: “A sex-ratio map of the United States in 1870,” she writes, “looks like one of China today.”

The Wild West, it turns out, wouldn’t have been so wild had there been more women around.

While women outnumbered men in certain Eastern cities — thus leveling out the sex-ratio nationally — men far outnumbered women in the West: Nevada had 320 men for every 100 women; Idaho, 433; Western Kansas, 768. These economies, she writes, served their demographics, with saloons and brothels the most lucrative businesses. Indian tribes would trade or sell their own women. The homicide rate in the West far outstripped the East. Women were assaulted; men were shot for sport. It wasn’t until the 1930s, when the rates of females to males became more equal, that the region really began to stabilize.

Similar parallels are emerging in Chinese and Indian provinces where the sex ratios are most imbalanced. From 1992-2004, Hvistendahl writes, the crime rate in China doubled; from 2003-2007, rapes were up by 30% and kidnappings by 50% in India. (This — not sexual harassment — was behind the government’s institution of female-only commuter trains.) Additionally, studies show that unmarried men are more prone to depression, in worse health and are more likely to suffer from unemployment or drug addiction.

Most researchers agree that the coming instability to the region will have global ramifications, but mainly in terms of migration patterns, emigration and ethnically mixed births. It’s the nations themselves that will face the more severe consequences — from lowered fertility rates to increased violence — if the sex-ratio imbalance can’t be redressed.

Hvistendahl, however — like Francese — is optimistic. As she writes, the actions finally undertaken by the Chinese and Indian governments are “perhaps the best indication that something is amiss.”