Distorted sex
ratios at birth a generation ago are changing marriage and damaging societies
in Asia’s twin giants
KHAPs
are informal local councils in north-western India. They meet to lay down the
law on questions of marriage and caste, and are among India’s most
unflinchingly conservative institutions. They have banned marriage between
people of different castes, restricted it between people from the same village
and stand accused of ordering honour killings to enforce their rulings, which
have no legal force. India’s Supreme Court once called for khaps to be
“ruthlessly stamped out”. In April 2014, however, the Satrol khap, the
largest in Haryana, one of India’s richest states, relaxed its ban on
inter-caste marriage and made it easier for villagers to marry among their
neighbours. “This will bring revolutionary change to Haryana,” said Inder
Singh, president of the khap.
The cause of
the decision, he admitted, was “the declining male-female sex ratio in the
state”. After years of sex-selective abortions in favour of boys, Haryana has
India’s most distorted sex ratio: 114 males of all ages for every 100 females.
In their search for brides, young men are increasingly looking out of caste,
out of district and out of state. “This is the only way out to keep our old
traditions alive,” said Mr Singh. “Instead of getting a bride from outside the
state who takes time to adjust, we preferred to prune the jurisdiction of
prohibited areas.”
The revision
of 500 years of custom by its conservative guardians symbolises a profound
change not just in India. Usually dubbed the “marriage squeeze”, the change
refers both to the fact of having too many men chasing too few brides and the
consequence of it in countries where marriage has always been nearly universal.
Sex selection at birth is common in China and India. The flight from marriage—with
women marrying later, or not at all—is long established in Japan and South
Korea. But until recently, Asia’s twin giants have not felt the effects of
sexual imbalance in marriage. Now they are.
The marriage
squeeze is likely to last for decades, getting worse before it gets better. It
will take the two countries with their combined population of 2.6 billion—a
third of humanity—into uncharted territory. Marriage has always been a
necessary part of belonging to society in India and China. No one really knows
how these countries will react if marriage is no longer universal. But there
may be damaging consequences. In every society, large numbers of young men,
unmarried and away from their families, are associated with abnormal levels of
crime and violence.
Missing girls, missing brides
The roots of
the current squeeze go back a generation. Sex-selective abortions became common
in China in the 1990s as a result of the country’s strict (now somewhat laxer)
one-child-per-couple policy and a traditional preference for sons. A few years
later they became increasingly common in India, also because of a preference
for sons and helped by the growing availability of prenatal tests to determine
sex. In 2010-15, according to the UN Population Division, China’s sex ratio at
birth was 116 boys to 100 girls; in India the figure was 111. Though these
ratios have fallen a little since their peaks, they are still far above the
natural rate, which is 105 to 100.
As a result,
enormous numbers of girls and women are “missing”—absent, that is, compared
with what would have happened if there had not been sex selection. If China had
had a normal sex ratio at birth, according to a report in 2012 by the UN
Population Fund it would have had 721m girls and women in 2010. In fact it had
only 655m—a difference of 66m, or 10% of the female population. India’s ratio
is not quite so bad. Had it been normal, the country would have had 43m more
women, or 7% more, than it actually did. Other countries practise sex selection
at birth, but Asia’s giants overshadow all others. Together they account for
109m of the 117m “missing” girls and women globally in 2010. Calculations by
Christophe Guilmoto of the Institute of Development Research, a think-tank in
Paris, show that marriage patterns in India and China were still normal in
2010. But they will become badly distorted by 2020 (see chart).
“Missing
women” are only part of the explanation. Countries with normal sex ratios can
experience a marriage squeeze if their fertility rates are falling fast.
Fertility is important, because men tend to marry women a few years younger
than themselves. In India the average age of marriage for men is 26; for women,
it is 22. This means that when a country’s fertility is falling, the cohort of
women in their early 20s will be slightly smaller (or will be rising more
slowly) than the cohort of men they are most likely to marry—those in their
late 20s (this is because a few years will have gone by and the falling
fertility rate will have reduced the numbers of those born later). This may not
sound like a big deal. But in fact between 2000 and 2010 the number of Indian
men aged 25-29 rose by 9.2m. The number of Indian women aged 20-24 (their most
likely partners) rose by only 7.6m.
Even if
India’s sex ratio at birth were to return to normal and stay there, by 2050 the
country would still have 30% more single men hoping to marry than single women.
This is explained by a rapid decline in India’s fertility rate. But in China,
where fertility has been low for years, the more gradual decline in fertility
still means there will be 30% more single men than women in 2055, though the
distortion declines after that. A decline in fertility usually benefits
developing countries by providing a “demographic dividend” (a bulge of
working-age adults compared with the numbers of dependent children or
grandparents). But it does have the drawback of amplifying the marriage
squeeze.
The problem
is further accentuated by a so-called “queuing effect”. The length of a queue
is determined by how many people join it, how many leave, and how long queuers
are prepared to wait. In the same way, marriage numbers are a result of how
many people reach marriageable age (the joiners); how many get married (the
leavers) and how long people are willing to wait. In India and China, marriage
remains the norm, so men keep trying to tie the knot for years.
Hence, a
marriage queue in India and China builds up. At stage one, a cohort of women
reaches marriageable age (say, 20-24); they marry among the cohort of men aged
25-29. But there are slightly more men than women, so some members of the male
cohort remain on the shelf. Later, two new cohorts reach marriageable age. This
time, the men left over from the previous round (who are now in their early
thirties) are still looking for wives and compete with the cohort of younger
men. The women choose husbands from among this larger group. So after the
second round even more men are left on the shelf. And so on. A backlog of
unmarried men starts to pile up. Just as you need only a small imbalance
between the number of people joining a queue and the number leaving it to
produce a long, slow-moving line, so in marriage, a small difference in the
adult sex ratio can produce huge numbers of bachelors. They are called guanggun
(bare branches) in China, malang (aloof and loopy)in Haryana and chhara
(a derogatory term for unmarried men) in Punjab.
To make
matters worse (for men, anyway), in rich Asian countries women are turning
their backs on marriage altogether. Women with university degrees are more
likely to marry late, or not at all, than those with primary education. Women
who live in cities and have jobs are marrying later, or less, than rural women
or those who work at home. Everywhere, female marriage rates are declining and
the age of marriage is rising. In China, as women get richer and better
educated, they are starting to repeat the behaviour of their Japanese and
Korean sisters, pushing up the number of unmarried men.
Lucky man
The
combination of these factors in India and China will make their marriage
squeeze especially acute and persistent—much more severe than it would have
been in the case of distorted sex ratios alone. Mr Guilmoto calculates that, in
China, for every 100 single women expected to marry in 2050-54 there could be
as many as 186 single men (see chart); in India in 2060-64 the peak could be
higher: 191 men for each 100 women. This assumes the sex ratio at birth does
not change. But even if the ratio were to return to normal in 2020 (which is
unlikely), the marriage squeeze would still be severe, peaking at 160 in China
in 2030, and at 164 in India 20 years later.
A marriage
squeeze of this intensity would be unknown in China and India and
extraordinarily rare anywhere in history. America’s Wild West (or the fracking
fields of present-day North Dakota) are rare examples of a society with huge
numbers of excess men.
There may be
positive side effects: a shortage of brides in India is causing dowry prices to
fall in some areas, for instance. Overall, though, the impact is likely to be
negative. A study by Lena Edlund of Columbia University and others found that
in 1988-2004, a one-point rise in the sex ratio in China raised rates of
violent crime and theft by six to seven points. The abduction of women for sale
as brides is becoming more common. The imbalance is fuelling demand for
prostitution.
There are
few obvious remedies. If girls married earlier, it would increase marriage
rates but would impede the progress being made by women in employment and
education. Brides can be found in nearby countries. There are villages in
China’s south-western provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou where many of the young
women are Vietnamese or Burmese because local girls have gone to work in
cities. A state-run newspaper, Beijing News, recently offered advice
about the ten best places for Chinese men to find brides abroad (Ukraine,
apparently, is promising). But this merely transfers the problem from one place
to another. China and India are so vast that no marriage migration could ever
be big enough to satisfy demand.
Bare branches on the family
tree
If—a big
if—marriage pairing were to become more symmetrical (ie, college graduates
marry one another, and so on), then at least the burden of non-marriage would
be spread more evenly. In India and China, women tend to “marry up”—illiterate
women marry men with primary education; primary-school women marry men with
secondary education; and so on. As a result, men at the bottom of the pyramid,
and women at the apex, find it especially hard to find spouses. So the marriage
squeeze does not affect everyone equally. It disproportionately hits illiterate
men and does not do much to help graduate women (shengnu, or leftovers,
as they are called in China).
But overall,
changing the patterns of marriage would merely moderate a squeeze which is
likely to continue for decades. China has eased its one-child policy, and the
sex ratio at birth has fallen. But because the marriage squeeze is the product
of other factors, too, it will continue even were the sex ratio at birth to
return to normal. If that happened, Mr Guilmoto reckons, over 21% of Chinese
men would still be unmarried at 50 in 2070, while in India the figure would be
almost 15%. Three generations after sex-selective abortions began, their impact
will still be felt.
India and
China will change hugely as they become wealthier and better educated in coming
decades. But few changes will be as momentous and persistent as the one now
beginning: universal marriage will become a thing of the past. The Economist
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