[OC] You may have heard of "missing girls" – the shortfall of women in the many countries where sons are preferred to daughters and people act on the preference. My analysis suggests this is rapidly ending. Two things are going on at the same time. One is that births are falling rapidly in places with strong boy preference (dotted line). The second is that even in these countries, boy preference is itself declining.
The news are, in other words, good. But, as we explore in the article, there are also the early signs of girl preference in the rich world. That preference may be a symptom of problems facing boys, and could, should people start acting upon it at scale, cause much frustration among young women in 20 years time.
Tools used: R, Illustrator
Sources: UN Population data (for '24-'25, projections)
Free to read gift link here: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/06/05/more-and-more-parents-around-the-world-prefer-girls-to-boys?giftId=7a9359af-fb17-4b80-ae3b-bcd1154b04df&utm_campaign=gifted_article / https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/06/05/more-and-more-parents-around-the-world-prefer-girls-to-boys?giftId=d71bf259-1bfa-4134-8e0b-0982ab6affbc&utm_campaign=gifted_article / https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/06/05/more-and-more-parents-around-the-world-prefer-girls-to-boys?giftId=e30cbe45-f60b-40c8-957e-f853bd864c8d&utm_campaign=gifted_article
Permanent link: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/06/05/more-and-more-parents-around-the-world-prefer-girls-to-boys
Posted by statisticalanalysis_
19 Comments
The news *is*, in other words, good. The word “news” is an uncountable noun.
The y-Axis is number of global pirates by the way
So with some lag people realize that girls would have better prospects in life and start to prefer girls. It doesn’t mean they necessarily hate boys (nor they hated girls when girls were aborted). 50+ years ago boy could get better education, job and help parents. Now a new boy would be lagging behind girls, distressed, undereducated and poor. So it is quite rational to prefer to give birth to a child who will have it better in life.
What lifting massive swaths of population out of poverty does to a mf, also education!
Ive read elsewhere that a lot of these missing girls in china are actually just unregistered girls as to not get in trouble because of the one child policy.
Is Y 1.5 = 98.5 girls for every 105 boys?
The y axis of your chart is unlabeled. This graph is confusing. While I know this fact already, because gendercide is being more seriously prosecuted in the industrializing third world, and women are now allowed to work jobs where they are not at a disadvantage (e.g. tech support vs farming) and can thus own their own money and become assets rather than liabilities for parents alongside the sundowning of china’s one child policy, it’s not clear what the 1.5 is.
They’re not “missing,” and I don’t know why you’re being coy. In societies that are exceptionally misogynistic, parents kill their infants when they are girls because they hate girls and want a boy. If they can only afford one child, they want it to be a boy so it can work and give them money instead of being a domestic slave like a girl.
First world countries, such as Canada, have a very slight majority in new births toward females, but this is minor variance. Middle class couples are not whelping boys, being surprised by the sex, killing them, and then trying again for a girl right away the way the chinese and india have done with girls. If you look at this data over a longer period of time, it will natrually swing back and forth because if you lump all births into a binary, one side or the other will have a little more since it’s not a perfect 50/50 split.
Where do your weird MRA talking points come from at the end there? If there’s an mra man and his tradwife broodmare who think men are disadvantaged in society (lol), they will be misogynists and prefer sons to daughters. They won’t practice selective abortion and prefer daughters and bias population numbers that way, what the hell are you talking about?
For what it’s worth, a vast majority of the parents I know still prefer to have boys. General consensus is they are easier to parent through their teenage years.
China graph seems to be highly correlated with the One Child Policy. It started in 1979 and ended in 2016.
Thank you for sharing a gift link to your work!
For China, the one child policy changed. People may still have a preference but not enough of one to not accept the child if there’s another chance.
Don’t think that future women’s frustration will happen. The contrary.
Preference isnt ending in China. They just dont give up the girls now
What equal rights movements *actually do*
Y is labelled under the title so that’s why everyone’s confused. It’s the quantity of girls who are estimated to have been aborted every year by millions
i never got why the preference was for boys, if in chinese culture its expected of the boy to financially support the girl and her parents?
This is not shocking. The big part in China is a mix of cultural and societal issues classing at once. Chinese culture has traditionally had the wife become part of the husband’s family, taking care of his parents as they get older and leaving her parents to her brother’s wife. As the CCP put the One Child policy into place, many people only wanted sons because if you only had one child, then you needed your son so his wife would take care of you. Now that the population is majority male, women are a low supply item. Part of the reason the CCP had to remove the One Child policy. Now with education, many women want careers and do not want to take care of their husband’a family. Even worse the marriage culture is AWFUL in China. People will crash weddings, make demands of the bride and groom, bride families will make massive demands for son-in-laws, and more. Even with the repeal of One Child many families in China cannot afford more than one child.
Is it because shortage of girls increases demand for them and makes having one economically justified? I read a guy in China has to pay fortune to the bride’s parents now.
Missing girls are the cause of the male loneliness epidemic