theme of the essay More than 100 million women are missing by amartya sen
Answers
Explanation:
In 1990, Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen noticed something remarkable. By his count, there were approximately 100 million “missing women” in Asia. They hadn’t been kidnapped or stolen or died as the victims of a female-specific plague or war . . . Yet a population equivalent to every single girl and woman in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy was missing. Using records collected by governments, Sen observed that relative to the number of men, there were far too few women. He estimated that 100 million girls who should have been born, and grown into women, had simply never existed.1
The number of men compared to the number of women, baby boys relative to baby girls, is called the gender sex ratio. It is measured at two intervals: recorded live births and the number of men and women across the population. Using both measurements is significant for observing trends in population health, family structure, and demographic planning. In most of the world, the number of women is slightly higher than the number of men—about ninety-eight men to every 100 women, mostly attributed to women’s slightly longer average life span. In Asia, however, there are 106 men for every 100 women. The difference in number grows even more extreme among those born after 1985. In China, a study of more than five million births between 2012 and 2015 showed that 110 boys were being born for every 100 girls.2 In 2011, the Indian state of Haryana recorded 120 boys born for every 100 girls. Societies with dramatically unequal birth sex ratios can suffer a variety of problems, such as a lack of stable families, “bride kidnapping” of unwilling women, large numbers of unmarried men leaving the country to find wives, and an even higher rate of violence against women and girls.3 The dramatic differences reported across Asia are not an accident of biology, but evidence of a widespread pattern toward “son bias” or “son preference.” The amount of preference families have toward sons instead of daughters is one of the metrics used to measure discrimination against women used by the Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) on their Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI).
The SIGI, the OECD’s analytical tool, uses complex statistical analysis to compare if women are treated fairly by comparison with men, country by country. Gender equality is sometimes only thought of as concerning basic rights: women’s right to vote or girls’ right to attend school as boys do. While these are vital human rights and far from a given in much of the world, they do not capture the whole picture of women’s social status. To get a better global picture of women’s equality, the SIGI uses a variety of analytical lenses and tools. Some of the tools they use assess the law toward women across the whole society: Do women have the same civil liberties as men, for instance, to speak freely without fear of persecution? Do women have the same physical integrity, for instance, to walk freely without fear of assault? In many countries, the answer is no; even in unstable contexts, when human rights are not guaranteed to anyone, the rights of women are comparatively limited in the public