Shortage of Women

Bad for men; bad for women.

In a recent review paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of British and Chinese researchers argue that sex selection in countries like China and India may have already set the stage for national crises by creating a surplus of men and a shortage of women.

Therese Hesketh, an author of the paper and researcher in child health at University College London, said the worst case scenario could be societal instability.

"Excess young men congregating together are known to be prone," she said, "to violent crime, what we call 'antisocial behavior.' And prostitution rates will go up, trafficking rates will go up."

Like so many other gender issues, this isn’t just about gender, but class. It’s not just an excess of young men, but an excess of young poor men.

The authors assert that over the next 20 years, in parts of China and India, there will be a 12 to 15 percent excess of young men—men who will have to remain single in societies that also place a high value on marriage. Because women will be able to select high status males to marry, the men who remain single are most likely to be members of the lower classes or those who are otherwise undesirable.

These unmarried, low-status males are the people most likely to be perpetrators of violent crime, the authors suggest. Previous research has shown a strong correlation between sex ratio and violence.

No family, no money, no opportunity—a recipe for disaster. And though it might seem on its face like women having a better choice of mates would be to their favor, it just never works out that way, because scarcity inevitably turn women into a commodity. Women will be put under more pressure to marry and have children, eclipsing any progress toward equality in education and employment, and making it that much harder to be independent and single by choice or to come out as a lesbian or transgender. Women from other countries will be “imported” as sex workers.

In other words, it’s a pretty ugly scenario for everyone, and it will take at least two generations to sort it out.

I don’t really have any wise words or anything; I just thought it was interesting how this pulled together two concepts about which we’ve talked a lot around here—the relationship between gender inequality and class, and how sexism is inexorably a problem for both men and women.