“Asia’s Missing Daughters: Where Have All the Young Girls Gone?” (Salon on June 10th, 2006)

May 2, 2006

Invitations will be sent out shortly for this upcoming salon, which will be held on June 10th, 2006. To keep our discussions to a manageable size, we cannot invite all of our members to every salon, but if you have a special interest in this topic then please contact Ann Evans and she'll take that into consideration. The summary is below:

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Girls are getting a lot of attention these days. At the same time as college girls are making headlines in the US for outnumbering college boys, there has also been an increasing level of concern around the severe shortage of girls in many Asian countries. Academic demographers have been documenting “sex ratios” in certain places that are heavily skewed, and the popular media has perked up its ears. Sex ratios refer to the number of males per 100 females. Under normal circumstances, the sex ratio should be just above or just below 100. For the world as a whole, for example, there are approximately 102 males per 100 females. However, some regions, such as Tamilnadu, India, have sex ratios that are so skewed that there are 160 boys for every 100 girls. With statistics like these, demography suddenly becomes a terribly interesting science.

Why is this happening, and what does it mean? One factor to consider is that the sex ratio imbalances are not evenly distributed across geography, culture and class. In India, they tend to be focused in particular castes situated in certain regions. Another factor is daughter discrimination, an issue that has been highlighted recently in India and China but has been documented historically across many cultures. Families who prefer male children will sometimes practice selective female abortion, female infanticide, or simply neglect their female children. The reasons why people carry out these practices are deeply nuanced; while some are common to all of human society, others are the result of a long, unique local cultural history. Governments have tried to legislate away the problem, but their efforts have not been very successful.

In this upcoming Club of Rome, we will address this pressing issue of “missing girls,” focusing primarily on the situation in India, with some additional information on China and other Asian and non-Asian countries. The presentation will begin with historic background on the issue of attitudes towards daughters around the world, including both Asia and Europe. We will then focus on some of the current evidence of the problem in India and China today, including regional and caste-specific sex ratios, records from death certificates, and demographic research in villages and communities. We will also discuss some of the major theories regarding causes of these imbalanced sex ratios, their social and political consequences, and some of the leading intervention efforts aimed at eliminating disparities in sex ratios and life opportunities for girls and boys. Through this discussion, we aim to explain the complexities involved in the issue and consider what strategies are possible for raising awareness and addressing the problem.

 

Pre-reading:

We recommend you read the following articles in preparation for the discussion:

 

Further information:


Presenter: Jana Haritatos

The presenter, Jana Haritatos, is a research psychologist with interdisciplinary training in social and health psychology, psychological anthropology and public health. Her commitment to issues of social inequalities and health disparities has crystallized over several years of experience both within and outside of academia. Growing up in rural Kansas in an area of diminishing economic investment, she witnessed the cumulative effects of geographic and economic marginality on health. As an undergraduate, Jana became interested in the role of inequalities in shaping life opportunities from a global perspective. In response, she undertook a semester of study in Hong Kong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she took courses in comparative Asia-U.S. social issues, local politics, and post-colonial reform. Through the university’s “Teaching in China” program, Jana spent time in rural China developing educational programs with elementary and high school students. She then went on to receive her PhD in Psychology from the University of Michigan in August of 2005. Although not her main area of research, while at Michigan, Jana’s interests in health inequalities and international human rights led her to join the research team led by Dr. Ramaswami Mahalingam, researching issues of daughter discrimination, female neglect and “missing girls” in India. During this time, she also spent a year working on a project documenting women’s lives and histories cross-culturally in India, China, Poland and the U.S. These experiences deeply shaped Jana’s on-going research interests, and continue to play a role in her commitment to issues of inequalities in health. Currently, Jana is a postdoctoral research fellow in Psychology and Medicine at UCSF, where her research centers on social status (e.g., race/ethnicity, SES, gender) and health, and how sociocultural and economic conditions influence stress processes to shape chronic disease development and population health disparities.

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