Unfortunately this isn’t a magic trick. These women are victims gone for good. According to the Toronto Star , the term ‘missing woman’ refers to an estimated group of 100 million women who ‘should be alive but are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services.’
Siwan Anderson, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, has made it her mission to look for the answers as to why the ratio of men to women in developing countries is below the norm. The answer so far has been complex and varied by region. For example, in China, Anderson has found that ‘most of the 141,000 excess female deaths by injury were suicides, making China the only place in the world where women are more likely than men to kill themselves, often by eating pesticides used for crops.’ In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV and AIDS is the leading cause of over 600,000 excess female deaths each year, and in India ‘injuries’ account for 86,000 excess deaths for women aged 15-29 in 2000 alone. (Many of these ‘injuries’ are actually cover ups for other domestic violence-related deaths).
Despite some convincing statistics, there are still many questions left unanswered like how many women are denied access to healthcare or coverage relative to the number of men, and what can be done?
Deep-rooted inequality is the reality in many societies, but by isolating gender discrimination as a cause of female deaths, researchers like Anderson hope to bring about some change to systems of oppression worldwide. ~Hannah
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