An alarming trend in gender inequality is Sen's Olin lecture topic

By Simeon Moss

Those who read the Sunday, April 22, New York Times cover story with the headline "Abortion in India is Tipping Scales Sharply Against Girls" received a post-view of Amartya Sen's April 19 Olin Foundation Lecture at Cornell.

Economist Amartya Sen, left, speaks with Jessie Saul, a doctoral student in science and technology studies who gave introductory remarks before Sen's April 19 Olin Lecture in Statler Auditorium. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and master at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, spoke to a full house in Alice Statler Auditorium and informed his audience that he had spoken to the Times writer, Celia Dugger, the day before and would include some of the 2001 census figures she had given him on India in his lecture; which he did.

The title of Sen's talk was "Gender and Inequality," and some of it concerned an issue outlined in Dugger's story -- the disturbing trend in the selection of male over female babies in India through the use of high-tech sex-determination tests and then the aborting of female babies.

"Gender inequality survives in most parts of the world -- from Japan to Zambia, from the Ukraine to the USA -- but inequality between women and men can take very many different forms," Sen said, stating his major theme at the outset. He stressed that gender inequality is not a homogeneous phenomenon but a collection of "disparate but interlinked problems."

"It is important to take note of the variety of forms that gender inequality can take," Sen said. "The reasons why this is important are several: First, inequality between women and men cannot be confronted and overcome by any one set of all-purpose remedies. Much will depend on exactly what form gender inequality takes. Second, sometimes inequalities of different kinds feed each other, and we have to be aware of their interlinkages."

Sen settled the bulk of his discussion on two of the most elementary forms, which he termed: "mortality inequality," which can be seen most acutely, he said, in North Africa and Asia, including China and South Asia, and manifests itself in unusually high mortality rates of women as compared to men resulting in an imbalance toward men in the total population; and "natality inequality," which involves the type of sex selection discussed in the New York Times article.

And although his discussion of these forms of gender inequality focused on his native Indian subcontinent, Sen said he hardly was claiming that that region exhibited the most extreme cases of gender inequality in every respect. Other forms are more prevalent elsewhere, he pointed out. For instance, he said, India and Bangladesh have had female heads of government, which the United States and Japan have not, and he added, "I had a vastly larger proportion of tenured women colleagues when I was a professor at Delhi University than I now have either at Harvard or at Trinity College, Cambridge."

However, in the area of mortality inequality, he said, India, as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh, are near the bottom in the world. "In the bulk of the subcontinent, with only a few exceptions, female mortality rates are much higher than what could be expected," he said.

He dismissed "conscious homicide" or the occasional cases of "female infanticide " -- which, he said, are "statistically extremely rare" -- as large factors in the mortality disadvantage of women. Instead, he argued, the onus should fall on the widespread neglect or disparity in health care and nutrition for women and girls.

The resulting imbalance in sex ratios -- India's overall female-to-male ratio is the lowest among the world's most populous countries, including China, which is next lowest --Sen has indentified in a well-known indicator he calls "missing women."

"The concept of 'missing women,'" he said, "was devised to give us some idea of the enormity of the phenomena of women's adversity in mortality by focusing on the women who simply are not there, due to unusually high mortality compared with male mortality rates."

The problem of "natality inequality," Sen pointed out, also is an old one -- "the preference for boys that many masculinist societies have" -- but is exacerbated by the advent of modern technologies, such as ultrasound, which help determine the gender of fetuses -- resulting in an insidious and sophisticated problem that Dugger's Times article illustrates.

"This is, of course, what you might call 'high-tech sexism,'" Sen said. And, he added, modernity and economic advantage are not part of the solution, but part of the problem in this case. "The more rich you are, the more easily you can afford techniques such as ultrasound to determine the sex of children in the womb," he said.

Thus, Sen argued, the solutions to the problem of mortality inequality don't seem to be the same as the answers to the problems of natality inequality.

"Further studies need to be done to see to what extent the economics, social, cultural and political factors mix together to contribute to this phenomenon," he said.

"We are looking at a phenomenon that must be analyzed with a much broader set of facts. Gender inequality is not one phenomenon but many, which will have many and complex solutions."

The Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Foundation established an endowment to fund the Olin Lecture Series at Cornell in 1986.