Moral Outrage for the "Missing" Women

If you've read the excellent feminist journalist Laura Flanders' first book, Real Majority, Media Minority (which I heartily recommend), you're already familiar with the fact that women represent the majority of the U.S. population, but less than half the world's population. Flanders writes:

Women haven't had the numerical upper hand worldwide since 1965. ... The only detailed discussion I could find of the documented decline of the world's women was a 1990 New York Review of Books article which estimated that although women naturally outlive men, the denial of food and healthcare to females had engineered a man-made shift in the planet's demography. The article was titled: "100 Million Missing Women."

One hundred million of us were estimated "missing" and for more than three decades it hadn't made the news? That's serious sidelining. Stumbling across the silence, I felt I'd downed a dose of the same contempt that determines who gets born and who survives. ... Neglect claims people's lives.

I bring up Flanders' book because this week's news includes a call to action for the "missing women" of the world. On womensenews.com (where else?), Joan Holmes writes:

Dr. Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Laureate, coined the term "missing women" to describe the great numbers of women in the world who are literally not alive due to family neglect and discrimination. This is roughly equivalent to all the deaths in all the wars of the 20th century; the most violent century in human history. This is a holocaust many times over. ... Where's our shame? Where's our moral outrage? ...

It is time for a new kind of action.

Even if every country in the developing world increases its education budget, there is no assurance that girls will be educated. Unless a government takes specific actions on behalf of women and girls, increased funding will only perpetuate and widen the gender gap. And the world's basic problems will persist.

Holmes, who heads The Hunger Project and is a member of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, goes on to list several concrete programs, in education, health care, farm work, and international aid, that will help address this serious problem. She ends, "We know what the world looks like with half of its population treated as inferior and insignificant. We can only imagine what the world would look like if girls and women could express themselves and be 'everything they can be.'"

You said it.