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    ISAS Working Papers

    Long-term studies on trends and issues in South Asia

    195: The ‘Missing Women’ in India

    Riaz Hassan, Visiting Research Professor, ISAS

    19 September 2014

    Twenty-five years ago Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen used the concept of ‘missing women’ to highlight the gender bias in mortality that results in a huge deficit of women in substantial parts of Asia and Africa. It was an innovative and novel way to use the sex ratios to assess the cumulative effect of gender bias in mortality by estimating the additional number of females of all ages who would be alive if there had been equal treatment of the sexes. Sen classified those additional numbers of women as ‘missing’ because they had died as a result of discrimination in the allocation of survival-related goods (Sen, 1990, 1992).