Besides a love for spicy food and sharing a continent, what do South Korea, China and India have in common? Distorted sex ratios that are leading to dramatically unbalanced societies.
South Korea, with its historically Confucian-based male bias, was the first country to report exceptionally high sex ratios, according to a March 6 cover story in The Economist. From 1980 to 1990, the figure rose from just above normal (a “natural” ratio is considered about 105 male to 100 female births) to 117, then the highest in the world, The Economist reported. And the nation has seen the long-term results, with a surplus of bachelors, most pronounced in rural areas, who increasingly seek brides from other parts of Asia.
But the sex selection tide is starting to turn. Between 1985 and 2003, the number of South Korean women surveyed who said they felt pressured to have a son fell by two-thirds, from 48 to 17 percent, the article said. The sex ratio is now 110 male to 100 female births. (China’s is 123 boys to 100 girls.) The Joongang Daily reported in January on a more recent survey that showed South Korean parents-to-be actually had a stronger preference for baby girls over boys.
Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank told The Economist she thinks attitudes in China and India are similarly changing, though perhaps at a slower pace than South Korea. Through anti-discrimination laws and media campaigns, she said, their respective governments are trying to reverse the “phenomenon of missing girls in Asia.”
