India’s skewed sex ratio

Poised to become the world's most populous country, India is grappling with a shortage of women. UdeM anthropologist Karine Bates looks at the multiple causes and far-reaching consequences. According to the United Nations' most recent report on world population growth, India will overtake China as the most populous country on the planet in 2023. Yet this country, which granted women the right to vote at the same time as men when it gained independence in 1947, faces a major decades-old demographic challenge: a shortage of women. The most recent census, taken in 2011, showed a ratio of 940 women for every 1,000 men, and 918 girls for every 1,000 boys (newborns to age 6). According to Karine Bates, a professor in Université de Montréal's Department of Anthropology, this gender imbalance has multiple causes and consequences, and a radical cultural shift is needed to correct it. A specialist in legal anthropology, Bates studied judicial and social reforms affecting women's property and inheritance rights, dowry and child support in India.