Asia Struggles for a Solution to Its ‘Missing Women’ Problem | Hacker News Reader

Asia Struggles for a Solution to Its ‘Missing Women’ Problem

wsj.com

47 pointskevindeasis59 comments

Not mentioned here is war: a traditional and horrifyingly effective means to dispose of excess male population.

“I feel badly for my mother who has to do all of the housework and wash all of my clothes at her age because I can’t find a wife,” he says.

...you're a grown ass man making your elderly mom do all the housework and laundry? I wonder why nobody's going after this jewel of a man!?

In Asia, it is customary that women take care of all the household tasks. Many women actually feel insulted (not sure if that's the right word, maybe more upset?) if a man starts to do one of those chores. This is more common in even the younger women there than you think.

Also, the way dating works is much different than the current western standards. Think more US circa 1930. Therefore, his not doing the chores may not be such a huge part of why he can't find someone.

Not making a judgment on whether its good or bad, but that's how it is.

You get to be seen to have got issues if you're doing housework in Asia. Probably from a broken family.

Living in Cambodia for a few years now, and I can definitely say that this is true. I always make the comparison of how in Western society, it is custom that a man carries the bags / does the heavy lifting; he doesn't feel bad about it, and it would upset him if he saw his wife / girlfriend / etc do heavy lifting instead of him, even when she's perfectly capable of doing so.

That's a good comparison. My wife is from Asia Minor, and despite being a modern career woman in other respects, gets very weirded out if I cook for myself. Cooking for both of us is fine, oddly enough, but she'll insist on doing it if it's just for me.

Everybody has their hang ups.

I tried to ask my mom to let me do the housework myself several times. It always ended up in arguments. She thought I wanted to kick her out by making her less significant.

That's a sad inditement on his attitude. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would hope most women would not tolerate such an attitude, nor would most men seek it.

Check out the statistics for Silicon Valley.[1] The gender imbalance is much sharper than for China.

[1] http://visualizing.nyc/bay-area-zip-codes-singles-map/

Neat stats.

Side note, people are really starting to use mapbox. Can anyone here tell me there experience with it?

I haven't gotten a chance to use the product yet, but from what I've heard it's really solid. I've implemented Google maps before and frankly it was a very basic experience with a completely unsustainable pricing model. It would not surprise me in the slightest if Mapbox forces Google to change their maps API or to drop the product all together.

Side note: I got a chance to hear from the CEO of Mapbox once and he came across as a really stand-up and hard-working guy. The company has a great story and was almost entirely bootstrapped, only recently taking major funding (they've been around for awhile). This alone will cause me to explore their product offerings when it comes time for my company to implement some map stuff.

Thanks I might try mapbox because of your story about the CEO.

I am not sure about Google dropping their maps. I think that will never happen. There is just too much data in their maps and Google is a data company. They are trying to include physical data in the web, which includes images, maps, buildings, infrastructure etc.

Another question, what is unsustainable about google's pricing model? I've only been trying out their free trial and they allow you to have more queries than mapbox. It seems that google will be cheaper than mapbox for a very long time.

I can't comment on MapBox's pricing as I haven't explored it yet. All I remember is that for the projects where I implemented Google maps, the pricing model wasn't sustainable for the upper bounds of projected user growth we had for it.

Silicon Valley is a self-selecting imbalance whereas China is not.

China has a parent-selected imbalance.

Interesting that the trend reverses if you select for an older age range. Perhaps the disparity is somewhat related to the continued success of cougar night at the Rosewood?

The trend reverses in older age because women live longer.

I was talking about changing the age-range to ~45-65 on the linked chart. Do you think that relative lifespan differences are still relevant at that age range? I'd guess it'd have more to do with partner selection bias than male partners dying off more quickly, but I don't know.

Not just Silicon Valley. Although US is not 'missing women', there are significant number of American men seeking foreign brides from EU and Asian.

As the article mentioned, the single imbalance will be much larger than the birth imbalance. This is because once a pair has formed, they drop out of the statistic, leaving just single men behind, and no single women.

The article predicted 186:100 single ratio in China, even though the birth ratio was much lower.

Isn't the problem exacerbated by the traditional monogamous relationship structures? Why must there be a pairing and nothing else? Why are there only two choices of "unmarried men" or "married men"?

Article's terms like "competing for brides" betrays a certain "ownership of women" mentality, IMO.

So when we talk about cultural attitudes leading to this "missing women" problem, we can't disregard the cultural/societal context of two-person marriage as the only way.

This is a really interesting topic.

I think that there are two ideas that combine to create a requirement for traditional monogamous structures - 1) Land Ownership and 2) The family as a power-wielding unit (not just immediate family but extended family)

Land is power, in Asia and everywhere else. It's advantageous for a family to get more land. Also, it needs people to take care of/improve the land. The best way to do this is to have a son who can earn more land, bringing it into the family, and then marry a young girl who can create more members of the family to work and repeat the process.

Now, here's where competition for brides comes into play - it is in the girl's best interests that she picks a mate with lots of land/power, since that means her offspring will be better off, and she will also probably have a better life. So potential suitors will compete to show they have better resources. This is really in the girl's interests - she has the power here.

So why doesn't a girl work herself? Well, in much of Asia, hard labor is still dominant. Men are much better at physical labor than women. With the advent of more IT-related jobs this is starting to change, but men are still in higher demand for jobs than women.

Thanks for this perspective!

It's fascinating to me to contrast this with the dominant American nuclear family paradigm. The family as a power-wielding unit is not the part of the American Dream. And so there's no incentive to build such extended families. A nuclear family strikes me as a much more expensive way to live, however.

But really, how many of us would want to live with our extended family? (A significant percentage would not, I reckon)

Much of the pressure for an extended family is the lack of rule of law and the need to have people close to you to watch your back. When people become more comfortable that they will not be treated arbitrarily, that pressure relaxes.

Awesome insight!

I would guess, having not studied the topic at all, that the tendency toward monogamy (or at least punctuated monogamy) long predates what you're talking about. It seems to me that people who are careful about insuring who they have children with will be much more successful at passing their genes on than people who are not so careful, and thus there ought to be some selective pressure for at least punctuated monogamy.

Women seem to prefer sharing an alpha male with other women, than have a harem of losers. Because of that, I think it would increase the mismatch.

There's really no such thing as an alpha male, the term is nonsense taken from some old bad science on wolves and misapplied on humans.

Read it as an 'attractive male' then.

No thanks.

No self doubt (despite their being controversy and some that support alpha male classifications) can be interpreted a number of ways.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/going-ape/galleries/al...

National Geographic have a different view to your extremely confident statement. There are those that support and reject your assertion. I'm not so quick to dismiss.

It's been debunked, fact; there is no controversy, it was even called bad science by the original scientist who published the original research on wolves. Nat Geo, if they're still running that crap, is not above relaying old bad information just like anyone else, it takes time for bunk science to exit the public consciousness. This is no different than the brain 10% thing people still believe, it's simply non-sense people don't know is non-sense just as this alpa-male stuff is.

Read the moon is a harsh mistress. They had very interesting solution to severe gender imbalance. From just a normal married treesomes to line marriages ( a commune with seniority).

There's no need to claim that monogamy is morally superior to believe that a gender imbalance is undesirable. That's like saying "well why should most people only be attracted to members of the opposite sex?" It's not a matter of should. It's just a fact that most people do, and that this is probably a rather strong instinct (with obvious evolutionary explanations) rather than an easily-changeable cultural coincidence.

Why polygamy is bad:

Shorter versions:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/01/the_p...

http://huntergatherer.com/good-reasons-why-polygamy-is-a-bad...

Much longer, more academic and legal arguments:

http://news.ubc.ca/2012/01/23/monogamy-reduces-major-social-...

Court of British Colombia's 355 pg reasoning:

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/15/2011BCSC1588.ht...

Many of those arguments also apply to serial single mothers.

True. But the findings of that study, of serial monogamy, may not be politically kosher. Hence why I can't really find any.

"One-to-many marriage really bad idea", news at 11.

It's funny to me that these articles study it through this lens of marriage, unquestioned. I suppose it's easier to model exclusive relationships.

Shouldn't this self-correct eventually with women becoming more and more valuable (dowries, etc.) until people have no problem having daughters since they'll be getting just as rich?

Sadly there's a considerable lead time and capex cost in spinning up new women of marryable age.

Dare I say I sense an opportunity for a startup to 'innovate' upon an 'entrenched industry', maybe even 'disrupt'; presumably by 'moving fast and breaking things'?

No more than the lead time and capex in spinning up new men of hard-laboring age.

Did you read the article? Men are currently over-provisioned in that availability zone.

1. dowries is money that the bride's family gives to the groom's family. you are thinking of bride price.

2. often times the dowry and bride price will mostly offset each other.

3. this already happens in china. it is so bad that sometimes the grooms and his family have to borrow money from relatives for the bride price.

4. this seem to only apply mainly to china and india. taiwan, japan, s. korea the dowry/bride price (if any) is only a token gift, with maybe the grooms family paying more money. but generally you're not doing this to make a profit.

regardless of all this, there is still no amount to incentivize having a daughter because technically daughters cannot pass down your family name, and own nothing. it doesn't matter if daughters are worth 1000000x a son in the dowry/bride price exchange if it means your lineage dies with you. daughters are considered part of the groom's family once they marry.

> it doesn't matter if daughters are worth 1000000x a son in the dowry/bride price exchange if it means your lineage dies with you

Guess it's just a very different culture. I'm more than happy to have my lineage die with me just to save a measly quarter million dollars haha.

The countries that are most affected by this problem are countries which have staggeringly large numbers of people already.

Is it truly all bad that population growth will be decreased somewhat by this problem?

Its not so much the population decrease as the distribution of people in different age groups. A lot of seniors with a much smaller number of young people is problematic when your structure is based on the other way around.

Oh, it's even worse than that. Lots of unhappy males leads to fear among the ruling class of where the discontent might lead, which encourages them to pick a fight to start a shooting war, which has the dual benefits of keeping the now-patriotic males busy on the front, and also directly serving to decrease their numbers to fix the original problem. Kind of a big problem if you're the one they decide to rile the masses up against.

How does this play out with countries with nuclear weapons?

// sorry for late response - flu shot did not work this time

In reality, the imbalance is even greater as many men aren't fit for marriage/relationship. Look at the men living on the streets, look at the criminal statistics, look at universities: too many men get lost somehow along the way and will never ever have a wife and children. Men genetically strive to be great to impress women. While this sometimes leads to new rock stars, the invention of airplanes and the creation of SV startups, the reality is that many more get lost on the wrong track (drinking/drugging to show how manly they are and because their peers do it, stealing something to "get rich quick", etc...). I even read a study that 100% of the children only stem from 30% of men (AFAIR, I do not find the link any more).

So those societies favoring the birth of boys over girls are really far away from what should be.

>One study by Lena Edlund at Columbia University and others suggested a causal link between a more masculine sex ratio and crime, analyzing province level crime data in China to show that a single point rise in the sex ratio of men aged 16 to 25 raised property and violent crime by between 5% and 6%

If they are referring to this study http://anon-ftp.iza.org/dp3214.pdf then this is contradicted by the abstract which claims the figure is 3%.

>feticide

I'm a bit surprised by the authors' reasoning here, as I would have imagined that they would be in favor of allowing the mothers to choose for themselves whether to carry a child. I guess they're in favor of choice unless the choice is different from their own.

> I'm a bit surprised by the authors' reasoning here, as I would have imagined that they would be in favor of allowing the mothers to choose for themselves whether to carry a child. I guess they're in favor of choice unless the choice is different from their own.

I think the idea is that the mothers are innocent and pure and the pressure to abort based on gender of the fetus is external. I imagine there is broad consensus against forced abortions in both pro-choice and anti-choice circles.

>I imagine there is broad consensus against forced abortions in both pro-choice and anti-choice circles.

Curious: in which category would you place Geeta Anand and Jaeyeon Woo?

I'd put them in a category of horrible people.

From the article: There are some hopeful signs. The imbalance in China and India appeared to peak at the end of the last decade and has started moving towards normal levels.

This sucks, but what can be done?

Non-nuclear Himalayan war. Has the added benefit of potentially pacifying Tibet.

Why does it suck? With genetic engineering looming, this is literally unimportant. There are no "missing" women. There are humans who have enforced gender selection. This is neither good nor bad empirically, without qualifying what constitutes good or bad. Wait till we have a Gattaca-esque cultural clash. THAT will be problematic and serve as testing grounds for the gradual adoption of genetic modification, among the majority of humanity. Why cure Wilson's disease when you can genetically screen it out?

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