Question

In a recent NY Times Editorial, Ross Douthat looks at the work of Sen and discusses how the "100 million missing women" has now increased to "160 million." He laments that the increase continues to demonstrate COMPLETELY the level of misogyny and the availability of abortions throughout the world. Based on your understanding of Emily Oster's research, what other alternate explanation(s) is/are there for some of these "missing women"?

Answer 1

First of all this is not a Statistics Question at all. Maybe a literature and journalism question.

In late 2005, a paper by Emily Oster, published in the Journal of Political Economy (JPE), claimed that the reason that China (and to some degree South Asian countries) had large female deficits was not gender differences in mortality (pre-and post-birth) – as argued by Amartya Sen and others for years – but the fact that higher prevalence of Hepatitis B carriers there led to naturally higher sex ratios at birth. But at 2008, Emily Oster posted a new paper on her web site with the title “Hepatitis B does not explain male-biased sex ratio in China” where she reports that there is in fact no link between Hepatitis B carrier status and the sex ratio at birth in China (Chen and Oster, 2008). This amounted to a complete retraction of the earlier claim. Researchers have also argued that other diseases, HIV/AIDS, natural causes, and female abduction are also responsible for missing women.

Hope that helps.