In a series of papers in the late 1980s, Amartya Sen claimed that about 100 million women were "missing," referring to the number of females who had died as a result of unequal access to resources in parts of the developing world. A subsequent debate has refined these estimates using different demographic techniques. In this paper, we review this debate, provide an update on the number of "missing women," 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 improvements for women's relative survival in most of South Asia and the Middle East, but deteriorations in China. Improving female education and employment opportunities has helped to reduce gender bias, while the increasing recourse to sex-selective abortions has worsened it.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Taylor and Francis Journals in its journal Feminist Economics.
Volume (Year): 9 (2003) Issue (Month): 2-3 (January) Pages: 263-299 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML,
plain text,
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote),
ReDIF
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)