Project

In 1989Amartya Sen first pointed to the millions of `missing women’ in South and East Asia that have died as a consequence of discrimination and neglect. Estimates of the `stock of missing women’ suggest that the problem is mostly concentrated in South and East Asia, and often related to sex-selective abortions and post-birth neglect of female children. In contrast, estimates of yearly excess female deaths, referred to as the `flow of missing women’, suggest that gender bias in mortality is much larger than what stock estimates suggest (about 4 to 5 million excess female deaths per year vs. around 100 million missing women in total), is as severe among adults as it is among children in India and China, and is larger in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South and East Asia. This project illustrates that the different implications from the stock and flow measures largely rely on the choice of the reference standard for sex-specific mortality and an incomplete correction for different disease environments in the flow measure. When alternative reference standards are used, the results of the flow measure can be reconciled with previous earlier findings of the stock measure.

Project start:
01. July 2022

Project end:
30. June 2023

Project management:
Dr. Cara Ebert, Stephan Klasen, Sebastian Vollmer