Dramatic media pictures of desperate would-be mobals clinging to overcrowded boats, climbing over border fences, or running across unguarded wasteland confirm statistical data: males are in the vanguard of unregulated as well as legal transnational migration. Less graphic photography of the average business-class section of a 747 flying from Los Angeles to Hong Kong would reveal that most of the comfortable globals en route are male as well. But scrutinize a daytime picture of an African or Asian village, and you are likely to notice that among the locals, women outnumber men, whether working in the fields, carrying water or firewood, preparing food, or tending children. If the Earth seems flat, this is far more so for males than for females. Even in the same village, in the same house, the destinies of boys and girls diverge startlingly, and not only in rural villages in the global periphery. Equality of the sexes in employment, income, political influence, and other circumstances is an elusive goal even in the richest countries of the global core. Northern European countries are often cited as having progressed furthest in this respect, but even there, the playing field (for example, in religious hierarchies) is not completely level. Nor does growing wealth guarantee progress in closing the gender gap. Male dominance is a deeply embedded tradition that has a way of trumping fairness: in modern Japan, where women have made significant strides by many measures, the Minister of Health and Welfare in July 2007 publicly referred to the role of women as being “birth-giving machines” (Economist, 2007d). When China in the late 1970s embarked on its economic reforms, one key to success was deemed to lie in bringing its population spiral under control. China’s “one child only” policy had the desired result, but in effect it frequently meant one male child only as tens of millions of pregnancies were aborted to ensure a male heir. Millions more female infants were and are abandoned, giving rise to an international adoption industry that is almost exclusively female. Today, economically booming China has a demographic surplus of some 20 million males, with troubling implications for the future.
Gender and societies: a grassroots approach to women in science