Tuesday, March 22, 2011

22 March 2011: Missing Women: Patters Across Countries, and Over Time

Jishnu Das
World Bank

Abstract:
Excess female mortality is the most egregious manifestation of gender disadvantage in health. We compute patterns of missing women at all ages for all countries in 1990, 2000 and 2008, and compare them to historical patterns from currently high-income European countries. Like in Anderson and Ray (2009), these computations reflect the flow of missing women in the preceding year. Globally, 6.1 million women went missing in 1990 and by 2008, the flow increased to 6.3 million missing women every year. This was predominanty fueled by a doubling in Sub-Saharan Africa. Three periods in a woman's life are particularly dangerous: infancy (0-5), the reproductive years (15-40) and older ages (50-70). In addition, India and China also face a well-known girl-deficit at birth.

The historical record from European countries suggest very similar patterns with sharp reductions in infancy between 1900 and 1930; in the reproductive years between 1930 and 1960 and; in the older ages after 1980 (we never see an at-birth deficit in these countries). The strategies for decreasing excess female mortality are age-specific. In infancy, clean water and sanitation reduce overall child mortality and excess female mortality. In the reproductive years, maternal mortality and in SSA, HIV/AIDS are main factors. Consistent with the argument that reducing missing women is thus related to improvements in overall institutional delivery of services, we document little or no correlation between missing women and vaccination, use of health care services or anthropometric outcomes--three commonly used markers of household discrimination against women.

Date: March 22, 2011
Time: 12:30 P.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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Note:
Please confirm attendance by mail to Jyoti Sriram at jsriram@worldbank.org by March 21st

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