It appears the endemic, world trend, towards what has been called gendercide is decreasing quite rapidly – the term was first coined in an Economist article in 2010. Gendercide is the practice of aborting female babies in the desire to produce more male ones; the practice has been most noticeable in India and China, but it has been evident in many cultures throughout the world. It first became widespread in the 1980’s when cheap ultrasound machines were made easily available, to determine the sex of the unborn child. That was bad enough, but the practice before ultrasound machines was just to kill the female children soon after they were born. I should add that China’s policy of restricting families to one child only exacerbated this practice.
The report in the current Economist magazine states that globally, among babies born in the year 2000, a staggering 1.6 million girls were missing from the numbers you would statistically expect. This year that number is likely to be 200,000, and it is still falling. The natural ratio is about 100 girls to 105 boys which, because of a statistical tendency for more boys to die young, means the numbers are roughly equivalent when the babies reach sexual maturity. In China, the numbers have fallen from a peak of 117.8 boys to 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 boys per 100 girls last year. In India, the numbers have fallen from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8 today. In South Korea, it is now back to normal, down from a staggering 115.7 in 1990.
The imbalance created by gendercide has far wider consequences than just the inhumane elimination of female fetuses. It has caused a serious excess of men, which has doomed many of them to lifelong bachelorhood. This, in turn, has contributed to a rise in cases of rape, and to a rise in civil strife, even war, in some countries – too many men, with little to do, create far more serious civil society problems than an excess of girls. It is interesting, and informative, that 93% of the world’s jailbirds are male.
The relatively sudden shift towards having more girls – demographics do not normally shift that quickly, they usually take decades, if not generations – has many possible reasons. Overall, it is positive trend from a social structure point of view. People tend to think that girls are easier to bring up, although I think the parents of teenage girls in the West might disagree with that. In more traditional cultures, it is regarded as the responsibility of daughters to look after aging parents. However, the new preference for girls may also reflect increasing worries about boys prospects in rapidly changing economic environment.
In much of the world, boys are falling behind academically; in rich countries, 54% of girls have tertiary degrees compared with 41% of males. Males are over-represented at the top of the economic tree, but also at the bottom, and that makes for a potentially angry, dangerous, core of social trouble.
One might say we are now heading for trouble from the opposite side – too many girls – but that hasn’t yet happened in any country.
It is a dilemma for society, and for governments, particularly when new techniques for tweaking genetic codes are allowing parents, and perhaps governments, to choose the sex of an unborn child. The thought of those possibilities is real and frightening. When you combine those techniques with the overall biggest problem facing mankind today – namely, too many people for the planet to sustain – the future becomes even cloudier. Add AI potentially making decisions for us, such as deciding that biggest problems in the world are caused by people, and therefore it would be better if they were eliminated, only adds fuel to the future fire.
Manipulation of human beings by us, or by AI, should keep us all up at night – it is not “if”, its “when” – but we barely seem to be able to acknowledge that this process is a reality, let alone design strategies to combat it. Perhaps it is high time to wake up?
