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November 1, 2005
100 Million Missing Women?
While persusing the website of one of the authors of Freakanomics, I found an interesting article from Slate by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. The article tells of the work of Emily Oster in studying the problem of the "missing women" in Southeast Asia. The hypothesis of the missing women is that, given normal ratios of births of male to female children, there should be many more females in Southeastern Asia societies than there are. The supposition is that the reason for this disparity is mysoginistic in nature. Oster showed that much, but not all, of this disparity can actually be traced to a higher than normal rate of Hepatitis B infection in those societies. As Hepatitis B infected women are more likely to give birth to boys, many of those missing women were simply never born at all.
The article is quite an interesting read. It ends with another anecdote about Oster that I found quite interesting as well. I'll leave it to you to check it out.
Posted by Lockjaw at November 1, 2005 10:06 AM
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