China’s ‘missing women’ theory likely overblown, researchers say
Births of many children, especially girls, were not registered as their parents were trying to avoid punishment under one-child policy, study shows
The commonly cited figure that about 30 million fewer girls than boys were born in China due to decades of a strict one-child policy might be exaggerated, according to a new study that has found the births of many girls were simply registered much later or not at all.
John Kennedy, associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas and Shi Yaojiang, from Shaanxi Normal University in China, combed birth data and found that a combination of late registrations and unreported births could account for a large portion of the so-called missing girls reported previously in Chinese sex ratio at birth statistics.
The researchers compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. The cohort, they discovered, grew by about 4 million people over two decades. The additional people included about 1 million more women than men.
“If we go over a course of 25 years, it’s possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren’t there at birth,” Kennedy said in a statement on the website of the University of Kansas.