‘Missing girls’ far outweigh party politics

Published: Monday, October 31, 2011

IN SEPTEMBER, the World Bank published World Report 2012 - Gender Equality and Development. It highlighted both significant progress in areas like education, and "sticky areas" that are stubbornly slow to improve. One of these "sticky areas" is what it calls "almost four million women missing each year". In other words, almost four million avoidable deaths of women.

The report points out that these women go missing for different reasons. "Depending on the period in the life cycle, girls and women are missing for different reasons. Missing girls at birth reflect overt discrimination in the household, resulting from the combination of strong preferences for sons combined with declining fertility and the spread of technologies that allow parents to know the sex before birth.

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