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It's interesting that there is a similar imbalance in China and India (~35m). That implies to me that the imbalance was not caused by the one child policy, but

It's interesting that there is a similar imbalance in China and India (~35m). That implies to me that the imbalance was not caused by the one child policy, but by sonograms and abortions.

chaostheory 9y ago
I could be wrong but the sonograms and abortions are also just a side effect. The real problem is that neither place puts much importance on gender equality. Women have even less opportunities than men over there, compared to the West. That said, things have improved and continue to improve though the pace is really slow
- verroq 9y ago
  I was under the impression that gender equality in Chinese society is much better than the west in some respects, espescially the amount of women in STEM.
  - squeegee7 9y ago
    In business, too -- there are proportionately more female billionaires.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway080383 9y ago
    I got that sense as well. I don't have numbers to back it up, but in grad school and where I currently work, there were very few women, yet it seemed like the ratio of Chinese men to Chinese women was closer to equal than the overall ratio of men to women.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I think it is quite easy to imagine a sexist society where that particular manifestation of sex difference doesn't exist but others do.
  - ploxiln 9y ago
    You have the correlation backwards, believe it or not. Great writing, lots of sources, in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... > Do we find that “countries that lack gender equity in school enrollment” and “stereotypes associating science with males” have fewer women in tech? > No. Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality. > Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures: >> Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637). > In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.
    - topmonk 9y ago
      As far as what I heard is that in cultures where a woman can choose watch she wants to do, most will not choose tech. Whereas, in countries where women are expected to do what society wants them to do, they are forced into tech because that is where the money is, and is how they can best help feed their families.
  - sevilo 9y ago
    In some aspects China is more sexist towards women: - girls are still less desirable simply because their children do not carry the last name - people still believe older women = less value whereas older men = more value - women who aren't married by 30 are considered "leftovers" But in some areas less sexist than western society - you don't take your husband's last name when you marry - you're not expected to quit your job and become a housewife when you have children - girls are expected to be good at math, science and engineering just as much as boys
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    "[Chinese] Tech companies also often tout the attractive women they’ve hired as incentives for more men to come on board, according to the HRW report. Both Tencent and Baidu were noted to have posted to their social media accounts interviews with male employees who cited having beautiful women around them as an incentive for working there" https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/23/17272620/chinese-tech-companies-alibaba-tencent-baidu-gender-discrimination https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/23/17272620/chinese-tech-com... Let's not forget the gender pay gap, which imo is the main culprit https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596713000978 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014759671... "In contrast to the United States and European countries, China has witnessed a widening gender pay gap in the past two decades." China is a still a very patriarchal society. Much more so than the US or EU.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Gender equality in China is much better after decades of the one child policy. Businessmen who would have raised their sons to take their place raised their daughters that way with no sons. I work with powerful Chinese businesswomen and they are no nonsense tough customers. They also do not have any of the delicate mixing of sexuality and asexuality that American businesswomen need to strike - the Chinese women are all business all the time.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Did you see the recent group photo of the 19th Congress, with apparently zero women?
    - mc32 9y ago
      That's skewed by the fact that Xi is the first Chinese leader to be born after the establishment of the PRC. So you won't see any product of the one child policy begun in 1979. It will be quite some time as CCP leaders tend to run on the old side of things.
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    Assuming that there are about 2 million Chinese who are millionaires or higher, your annecdote only affects up to 0.11602610587% of the population
- hudon 9y ago
  I think you’re both right. Placing less value on baby girls and allowing people to kill their baby girls are together causing there to be less baby girls.
YetAnotherNick 9y ago
Of course? Government knows this. It is illegal for doctors to tell the gender before birth in India. In fact, due to weight of it, it is one of the few illegal activities regularly checked by authorities and media, and the culprits are given harsh punishments.
praneshp 9y ago
It's like quoting a wikipedia article, but there was an episode about this in a LastWeekTonight type show[0]. Two takeaways: 1. One of the southern states (that I'm from) ranks super-high in killing baby girls, despite what one would think intuitively. 2. Doctors offer Levi's style buy 1, get 2nd 50% off style packages for sex-determination test + abortions (both of which are banned). To ensure that parents-to-be get both, they lie that the foetus is a girl. [0] http://www.satyamevjayate.in/female-foeticide/femalefoeticide.aspx http://www.satyamevjayate.in/female-foeticide/femalefoeticid..., scroll down for the episode
- heartbreak 9y ago
  > killing baby girls Sorry to nitpick, but female foeticide (sex-selective abortion) would be better described as “aborting female fetuses.”
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ihsw2 9y ago
    It is murder.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I was referring to female infanticide, not foeticide.
    - heartbreak 9y ago
      The state you’re from ranks highest in female infanticide?! That is terribly sad.
      - praneshp 9y ago
        Super-high. Pretty sure there is a handful worse than us, if it matters..
      - 9y ago
azernik 9y ago
The claim about the one-child policy is just that it increases the attractiveness of selective abortion, since you only have one chance at a son.
ggg9990 9y ago
How could the one child policy create a gender imbalance? Every child born has a 50% probability of being either gender.
- kaishiro 9y ago
  The assumption in this case would have been that the birth parents are made aware of the gender before birth and then are able to make a decision as to whether to abort and attempt for a male, or keep the female feotus.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Female children can be a burden in that a dowry is expected to be paid at a marriage in certain cultures and males might be expected to support the parents in certain cultures for another source of preference. There is also the culture that might prefer lineage to be passed down via males and some cultures prefer a male child to help in rural area manual labour around the home. These are mentioned in the article a bit - add to that the ability to determine the gender of a baby before birth and the ability to perform an abortion after determining gender and while technically against the rules in both nations, a gender based abortion will help create the gender imbalance. There's also a natural slight skew to having male babies among humans, it's much closer to 50/50 on conception but by birth it's not due to higher female mortality in the womb.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    China actually has the opposite dowry problem: it's the male side that's expected to pay, and because of the skewed gender ratio, prices have risen. There are now families who don't want to have a son because they wouldn't be able to marry him off.
- sevilo 9y ago
  why is this comment down voted by people? When I was born doctors were forbidden for reveal the gender of the baby. If anything I actually think one child policy helped the gender imbalance, before then, people could have how many ever children they want and abort how many ever baby girls they desired.
glasslion 9y ago
At least in China, it has nothing to do with sonograms or abortions. Chinese doctors are not allowed to tell parents the gender strictly. Female babies are killed after they are born.

It's interesting that there is a similar imbalance in China and India (~35m). That implies to me that the imbalance was not caused by the one child policy, but by sonograms and abortions.

chaostheory 9y ago

I could be wrong but the sonograms and abortions are also just a side effect. The real problem is that neither place puts much importance on gender equality. Women have even less opportunities than men over there, compared to the West. That said, things have improved and continue to improve though the pace is really slow

verroq 9y ago
I was under the impression that gender equality in Chinese society is much better than the west in some respects, espescially the amount of women in STEM.
- squeegee7 9y ago
  In business, too -- there are proportionately more female billionaires.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway080383 9y ago
  I got that sense as well. I don't have numbers to back it up, but in grad school and where I currently work, there were very few women, yet it seemed like the ratio of Chinese men to Chinese women was closer to equal than the overall ratio of men to women.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I think it is quite easy to imagine a sexist society where that particular manifestation of sex difference doesn't exist but others do.
- ploxiln 9y ago
  You have the correlation backwards, believe it or not. Great writing, lots of sources, in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... > Do we find that “countries that lack gender equity in school enrollment” and “stereotypes associating science with males” have fewer women in tech? > No. Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality. > Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures: >> Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637). > In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.
  - topmonk 9y ago
    As far as what I heard is that in cultures where a woman can choose watch she wants to do, most will not choose tech. Whereas, in countries where women are expected to do what society wants them to do, they are forced into tech because that is where the money is, and is how they can best help feed their families.
- sevilo 9y ago
  In some aspects China is more sexist towards women: - girls are still less desirable simply because their children do not carry the last name - people still believe older women = less value whereas older men = more value - women who aren't married by 30 are considered "leftovers" But in some areas less sexist than western society - you don't take your husband's last name when you marry - you're not expected to quit your job and become a housewife when you have children - girls are expected to be good at math, science and engineering just as much as boys
- chaostheory 9y ago
  "[Chinese] Tech companies also often tout the attractive women they’ve hired as incentives for more men to come on board, according to the HRW report. Both Tencent and Baidu were noted to have posted to their social media accounts interviews with male employees who cited having beautiful women around them as an incentive for working there" https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/23/17272620/chinese-tech-companies-alibaba-tencent-baidu-gender-discrimination https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/23/17272620/chinese-tech-com... Let's not forget the gender pay gap, which imo is the main culprit https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596713000978 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014759671... "In contrast to the United States and European countries, China has witnessed a widening gender pay gap in the past two decades." China is a still a very patriarchal society. Much more so than the US or EU.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ggg9990 9y ago
Gender equality in China is much better after decades of the one child policy. Businessmen who would have raised their sons to take their place raised their daughters that way with no sons. I work with powerful Chinese businesswomen and they are no nonsense tough customers. They also do not have any of the delicate mixing of sexuality and asexuality that American businesswomen need to strike - the Chinese women are all business all the time.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Did you see the recent group photo of the 19th Congress, with apparently zero women?
  - mc32 9y ago
    That's skewed by the fact that Xi is the first Chinese leader to be born after the establishment of the PRC. So you won't see any product of the one child policy begun in 1979. It will be quite some time as CCP leaders tend to run on the old side of things.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  Assuming that there are about 2 million Chinese who are millionaires or higher, your annecdote only affects up to 0.11602610587% of the population
hudon 9y ago
I think you’re both right. Placing less value on baby girls and allowing people to kill their baby girls are together causing there to be less baby girls.

YetAnotherNick 9y ago

Of course? Government knows this. It is illegal for doctors to tell the gender before birth in India. In fact, due to weight of it, it is one of the few illegal activities regularly checked by authorities and media, and the culprits are given harsh punishments.

praneshp 9y ago

It's like quoting a wikipedia article, but there was an episode about this in a LastWeekTonight type show[0]. Two takeaways: 1. One of the southern states (that I'm from) ranks super-high in killing baby girls, despite what one would think intuitively. 2. Doctors offer Levi's style buy 1, get 2nd 50% off style packages for sex-determination test + abortions (both of which are banned). To ensure that parents-to-be get both, they lie that the foetus is a girl. [0] http://www.satyamevjayate.in/female-foeticide/femalefoeticide.aspx http://www.satyamevjayate.in/female-foeticide/femalefoeticid..., scroll down for the episode

heartbreak 9y ago
> killing baby girls Sorry to nitpick, but female foeticide (sex-selective abortion) would be better described as “aborting female fetuses.”
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ihsw2 9y ago
  It is murder.
- praneshp 9y ago
  Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I was referring to female infanticide, not foeticide.
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    The state you’re from ranks highest in female infanticide?! That is terribly sad.
    - praneshp 9y ago
      Super-high. Pretty sure there is a handful worse than us, if it matters..
    - 9y ago

azernik 9y ago

The claim about the one-child policy is just that it increases the attractiveness of selective abortion, since you only have one chance at a son.

ggg9990 9y ago

How could the one child policy create a gender imbalance? Every child born has a 50% probability of being either gender.

kaishiro 9y ago
The assumption in this case would have been that the birth parents are made aware of the gender before birth and then are able to make a decision as to whether to abort and attempt for a male, or keep the female feotus.
stevenwoo 9y ago
Female children can be a burden in that a dowry is expected to be paid at a marriage in certain cultures and males might be expected to support the parents in certain cultures for another source of preference. There is also the culture that might prefer lineage to be passed down via males and some cultures prefer a male child to help in rural area manual labour around the home. These are mentioned in the article a bit - add to that the ability to determine the gender of a baby before birth and the ability to perform an abortion after determining gender and while technically against the rules in both nations, a gender based abortion will help create the gender imbalance. There's also a natural slight skew to having male babies among humans, it's much closer to 50/50 on conception but by birth it's not due to higher female mortality in the womb.
- yorwba 9y ago
  China actually has the opposite dowry problem: it's the male side that's expected to pay, and because of the skewed gender ratio, prices have risen. There are now families who don't want to have a son because they wouldn't be able to marry him off.
sevilo 9y ago
why is this comment down voted by people? When I was born doctors were forbidden for reveal the gender of the baby. If anything I actually think one child policy helped the gender imbalance, before then, people could have how many ever children they want and abort how many ever baby girls they desired.

glasslion 9y ago

At least in China, it has nothing to do with sonograms or abortions. Chinese doctors are not allowed to tell parents the gender strictly. Female babies are killed after they are born.