Bachelor Nations

As the global population hits seven billion, experts are warning that skewed gender ratios could fuel the emergence of volatile “bachelor nations” driven by an aggressive competition for brides. The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto calls the “alarming demographic masculinisation” of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear. But many demographers believe the resulting shortage of adult women over the next 50 years will have as deep and pervasive an impact as climate change. The statistics behind the warnings are grimly compelling. Nature provides an unbending biological standard for the sex ratio at birth of 104-106 males to every 100 females. Any significant divergence from that narrow range can only be explained by abnormal factors. In India and Vietnam the figure is around 112 boys for every 100 girls. In China it is almost 120 to 100 and in some places, higher than 130. The trend is spreading to regions like the South Caucasus, where Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia all post birth ratios of more than 115 to 100, and further west to Albania and Kosovo. Global awareness of the problem was raised back in 1990 with an article by the Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen that carried the now famous title: More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. READ MORE