History of Feminism

gollygee

(22,336 posts) Wed Oct 21, 2015, 04:44 AM Oct 2015

Where the girls are (and aren't)

This talks about abortion of female fetuses, but also health, education, early marriage, etc. It felt to me like the emphasis was on how girls and women (but mainly girls) are treated in the world.

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/20/448407788/where-the-girls-are-and-aren-t-15girls

The world's girls are healthier than ever. They live longer and more of them are going to school than at any time in history.

This story is part of our #15Girls series, profiling teens around the world. Read the stories here.
But most of them face discrimination simply because they are girls. The discrimination happens at every point in their lives.

In some cases, it starts even before they're born, when parents decide to abort a pregnancy if the fetus is female.

A good way to get a sense of the progress — and the remaining gaps — in worldwide gender equality is by looking at the data. Numbers can tell a compelling story. The story we're going to tell focuses on girls ages 10 to 19, an age range used by the World Bank and other groups to track populations. Worldwide, about 600 million girls fall into this age range. Nearly half of them live in just seven countries. Those countries are the focus of our story.

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Where the girls are (and aren't) (Original Post) gollygee Oct 2015 OP

So friggin sad ismnotwasm Oct 2015 #1

ismnotwasm

(42,486 posts)

1. So friggin sad

Reply to gollygee (Original post)

Wed Oct 21, 2015, 11:09 AM

Oct 2015

China and India aren't the only countries that show this trend. They are just the largest.

Why Some Parents Prefer Boys

In India and China, the birth of a son is cause for celebration. The family has gained a future asset: a child who can earn money for his parents and support them when they are old.

That's not the case for girls. "It's more expensive for a family to have girls than boys," says Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. A boy has greater earning potential in these societies because there is a stigma against women working outside the home. And in India, when a daughter gets married, her family usually makes a generous donation of money and gifts to the groom's family.

So a daughter is seen as a drain on the family's resources. There's an Indian saying: Raising a daughter is like "watering someone else's garden." In other words, the benefits of raising a daughter will be reaped by the family the daughter marries into, not her own family.

In India, a girl is also more likely than a boy to die before she turns 5; that's the only country in the world where that's true. It's mostly to do with neglect. Biologically, girls have an advantage in the first few years of life. But in India, where the majority of people don't earn much more than $2.40 a day, scarce resources can mean a boy gets extra food and medical attention while his sister doesn't.

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