Dangerous to be a Girl

A friend posted this article from UK paper The Telegraph and I feel it's an important topic to address.

The article discusses a recently released United Nations report which states that India is the most dangerous place in the world to be born a girl, with females almost twice as likely to die before the age of five.

Another UN report (from 2009/2010) on achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in the Asia-Pacific region states:

Girls have a biological advantage which should make them better able to survive the early years than boys. As a result, other things being equal, the ratio between the under-five mortality rates for girls and boys should be less than one – in Australia and New Zealand, for example, the ratios are 0.83 and 0.85, respectively. But in 16 countries in Asia and the Pacific the ratios are 0.99 or greater. The highest are in China (1.41), India (1.10), Pakistan (1.08), and the Federated States of Micronesia, Nepal and Tonga (1.07).

So, technically, more girls than boys should survive past the age of five. Yet in 2011, girls in India were nearly twice as likely than boys to die before the age of five.

The Telegraph article explains it this way:

Girls are widely regarded as a burden to Indian families who fear the high costs of their weddings and resent spending money on their education only for them later to leave the home to marry. 

A text written by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Handbook on Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 (PNDT) (the law against determining the sex) elaborates:

A pernicious form of violence against women in some parts of India has been and still is the elimination of the girl child or female infanticide. Various methods were found to eliminate the girl child after her birth like starving her, crushing her under the bed or giving her poison etc. Pertinently, the responsibility for killing the child was fixed on the woman/mother as she was considered responsible for bringing the girl child into existence.  

Exorbitant dowry demand is one of the main reasons for female infanticide. Some of the other reasons are the belief that it is only the son who can perform the last rites, lineage and inheritance runs through the male line, sons will look after parents in old age, men are the bread winners etc.

Census statistics show that India's sex ratio in 2011 was 914 girls per 1000 boys.

In contrast, according to the 2010 census, there are 967 men per 1000 women in the U.S.

According to the Handbook

Things have come to such a pass that in some villages of Madhya Pradesh, no marriages have taken place for years because there are no girls and the boys are married by buying girls from faraway villages of Bihar for paltry sums. In one district in west Rajasthan, in 1997, the first “baraat” was received after 110 years and in another clan, there are only two female surviving children compared to 400 male children...[in] Dang district of Rajasthan [there is] a woman living as the wife of eight brothers. 

Though the issue is widespread, and certainly does not always stick to a pattern, there is, statistically, a pattern.

The under-five mortality rate in India did decrease between 1995 and 2005. The infant mortality rate generally decreases as wealth increases. And a child whose mother has no education is less likely to survive to the age of five than a child whose mother has completed a full course of primary schooling.


In both 1995 and 2005, the mortality rate was higher in rural areas than in urban areas. And at both times the mortality rate for females was higher than males in rural areas, while the opposite was true in urban areas.

The MDG report states that

High mortality of girls in these subregions is often a reflection of patriarchal norms – which result, among other things, in strong patterns of son preference and the neglect of young girls. A recent study in India, for example,  found that girls were five times less likely than boys to be hospitalized for a childhood illness.

It should be said that some states in India, such as Kerala and Meghalaya, have matrilineal societies, where the importance of men and women is essentially reversed.

After marriage, the groom leaves his family to live with the bride's family. Property is passed down from mother to daughter. As with many languages, nouns have a gender, the difference here being that all "useful" things are feminine (ex: the word for tree is masculine, but when the wood is turned into any building material, the noun becomes feminine). The woman is revered as "the giver of all life". The men have power (there were no queens, only kings) -- but the right to that power is inherited from the women (the king's son cannot become king, only his sister's son).

In Thomas Laird's essay "A woman's world - Meghalaya, India; matrilineal culture," a professor at Shillong University describes the balance this way:

Women do not suffer here; we walk hand in hand with the man. We are not killed for our dowry, as happens too frequently in India. We are not forced to abort a fetus because of its sex, as happens too frequently in India and China. We are not forced into prostitution just because we want a divorce, as does still happen in village India. Here, in our world, women and men help each other in fact.

Unfortunately, these cultures are the exception rather than the rule.