The Search for 100 Million Missing Women Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Search for 100 Million Missing Women - Essay Example This includes preference for boy babies in a patriarchal society, leading to female infanticide; neglect of baby girls in terms of care, nutrition and education; trafficking of adolescent girls through prostitution. Sen argued that all these factors combined to create a disparity of 100 million missing women in Asia. Although the reasons given by Sen are true, they only account for 50 million missing women. Looking to explore this statistical void, other economists took interest in the problem. One such was Emily Oster, who pursued the link between Hepatitis B occurrence and Asia's missing women population. By perusing reliable repository of medical statistics from the region, Oster was able to establish a definite link between Hepatitis B incidence levels and sex ratio in India, China and Pakistan. Backed by reliable statistics and a provable thesis, the finding has altered conventional wisdom. In this case, Oster's finding corrected and expanded Amartya Sen's stated reasons for ske wered sex ratio. At the core of the finding's success is the absence of 'n of 1' patterns in the data. As Oster's own personal history as a prodigious child shows, discounting exceptions to the rule is an important aspect of proper scientific research.