Why the Vast Majority of Women in India Will Never Own a Smartphone

This piece, which I found interesting, argued that the One Child Policy actually had a sort of "feminist" effect and was not exactly to blame for the gender imbalance:

> Besides, there were benign aspects of the one-child policy, especially for girls. Traditionally females were used as domestic help, birth machines or clan assets to marry off or trade. Women didn’t go to school, and were encouraged to internalise the saying that ‘a woman without talent is virtuous.’ Illiteracy was their proper condition: they were there to clean, farm, and above all to give birth to a male heir. They could not dine with men at the same table. Even today in many rural areas, all the family resources are invested in the male heir. The one-child policy forced people to review many of their assumptions, and at least try to treat girls as they would boys: parents, after all, were not able to choose their child’s sex, and had to come to terms with whichever they got. The policy also ended the nonsense that having a girl put paid to the family line. I have only one male cousin on my father’s side (regarded as the precious ‘trickle’ of the family bloodline), but when he had a girl, our family promptly abandoned their absurd talk about the male line. Cheers.

> Western scholars and human rights activists are inclined to blame the one-child policy for forced abortions, female infanticide, the under-reporting of female births and so on. These issues were deadly serious but they resulted less from the policy than from the nature of Chinese patriarchy, which the policy threw into sharp relief. People were willing to break the law, to pay a fine to have a second go at having a boy, even to murder or abandon female babies. Paradoxically the one-child policy undermined the atavism of tradition, even while seeming to encourage it. I grew up in Hefei, about 500 km west of Shanghai, where I remember a striking young girl from the countryside who attended a private violin class; she was the daughter of peasant parents who spoke poor Mandarin. Without the one-child policy, her father would have tried fanatically to conceive a second, third, fourth child, until the family produced a male heir. His daughters would have led miserable lives. Instead, he invested in his only child’s violin lessons.