The United Nations estimates that, based on standard demographics, there should be about 40 million more girls and women living in China than can be found in official counts. Some of these “missing women” were never born. Ultrasound technology makes it possible to detect a child’s sex before birth and abort a child of the “wrong” sex. Other girls were neglected or abandoned.
Chinese cultural traditions value boys above girls. Without public pensions or health care, the financial support of a son is insurance against destitution in old age, especially in rural, farming communities. Sex selection is exacerbated by China’s one child policy, but India, Pakistan, and a number of other countries also have millions of missing women.
Some American academics have speculated that immigrants from regions where sex selection occurs may retain their preferences for a son or daughter when they emigrate. Studies using U.S. census data have found some evidence that Chinese-Americans and South Asian-Americans select for sons. Could it happen here? Is it happening?
A recent study by Douglas Almond, Lena Edlund, and Kevin Milligan asked: do Canadian families select for sons? Their test families were ones with two girls. If those families decided to have a third child, did they have a boy or a girl? Absent sex selection, about 1.05 boys are born for every girl. But when their group of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese Canadian families with two girls decided to have a third child, they have a boy 1.39 times more often than a girl – a difference outside what can be explained by biological variation. Some parents in Canada do seem to prefer sons.
But are there missing women in Canada’s Chinese community? In Canada, there are more Chinese girls than boys. Based on the 2006 public use census files, 51 per cent of Chinese children under 15 in Canada were girls. This is surprising. Normally more boys are born than girls – nature’s way of compensating for boys’ higher mortality rate. Perhaps some of China’s missing women can be found in Canada, girls who have been adopted by Canadian families.
To exclude adoptees, I also considered only Chinese children who had been born Canada. In the 2006 census, there were 105.15 Chinese-Canadian boys under 15 for every 100 girls – compared to 105.15 boys for every 100 girls in the non-visible minority population. There is no more evidence of “missing girls” in Canada’s Chinese community than in the non-visible minority population. Yes, there may be some families who prefer sons. But there aren’t very many of them, and they may be offset by families who prefer daughters. And the many more families who love and accept their children for who they are.
The Canadian experience suggests that missing women are not an inevitable product of Chinese culture. Any preference for sons weakens considerably when people have education, the freedom to have more than one child, and economic reasons to value daughters.