ABSTRACT
Why does this book single out daughters in East and South Asia for investigation and analysis within a development context? There is one most important reason and that is the increasing scale of discrimination against daughters and numbers of ‘missing girls’ in much of East and South Asia where there has been both rising economic development and improvements in the status of women. In his path-breaking article in the New York Review of Books in 1990, entitled ‘More than 100 Million Women are Missing’, Amartya Sen suggested that world-wide and especially in Asia, women were ‘missing’ in their millions from the population totals of many societies. He argued that the number of missing women in any population can be estimated by calculating the numbers of extra women who would have survived in that society if it had the same ratio of women to men as obtain in other regions of the world where both sexes receive similar care. He surmised that if equal proportions of the two sexes could be expected, the low ratio of 0.94 women to men in South Asia, West Asia and China would indicate a deficit amounting to 6% of their women, but that since in countries where men and women receive similar care the ratio is about 1.05, the real shortfall is about 11%. For China alone, he estimated that, taking 1.05 as the benchmark ratio, this amounted to 50 million ‘missing women’. Sen calculated that when this number is added to absent females in South Asia, West Asia and North Africa a great many more than 100 million women are ‘missing’. He concluded that these numbers ‘tell us, quietly a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to excess mortality of women’.1
