Fascinating article in today’s Washington Post by Emily Wax about how Indian brides-to-be are holding out for one particular convenience before committing to marriage: an indoor toilet.
But wait, you may say: women in India don’t have the leverage to make such demands, do they?
Well, some of them do. As Wax explains, the “son preference” exhibited in India (and elsewhere) has produced an unintended consequence for those sons once they are grown:
A societal preference for boys here has become an unlikely source of power for Indian women. The abortion of female fetuses in favor of sons — an illegal but widespread practice — means there are more eligible bachelors than potential brides, allowing women and their parents to be more selective when arranging a match. …
Satellite television and the Internet are spreading images of rising prosperity and urban middle-class accouterments to rural areas, such as spacious apartments — with bathrooms — and women in silk saris rushing off to the office.
We have more to say in SuperFreakonomics about the plight of Indian women, particularly as affected by satellite TV; here’s a clue.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
A free market solution to inequality!
Um, for clarification – I do think this shift of power to the formerly powerless is pretty awesome, but I am not actually suggesting that it’s a good idea to abort fetuses of marginalized groups.
Unfortunately this is not always the case. There have been a rise in India, China and other countries that value boys above girls in the abduction of women. Not to be sold off to the sex slave market but to become wives.
Hopefully, this will also mean that women will get more control over how many children they bear. India’s fertility rate is 2.8 per female of childbearing age, which is about 40% higher than the replacement rate. This isn’t good for a nation that’s already overcrowded (or is the US “dangerously underpopulated”, as per the Simpsons’ Apu)
One man can impregnate many women; one woman usually only carries the baby for one man. This asymmetry also means the birth rate will go down as their lower numbers constitute a bottleneck. This will have big implications for who calls the shots later.
One could also surmise that an abundance of boys and a shortage of women removes breeding selectivity–that is, almost all the women will have babies as opposed to only those more apt to be chosen.
This might not be true if there was an abundance of women and a shortage of boys. Then the less attractive women might not be paired up and might not have children.
All this applies to an ideal world that makes some sense…not actually the one we seem to have.
“unlikely source of power”??
It always seemed like the inevitable logical consequence to me…
curiously, I know of two cases- a woman (daughter of a Brahman priest) and a man (the son). In the interest of preserving his’ indepependence minus the stress, he is now a school janitor, unmarried in the US. She is an administrative secretary (independent homeowner, mother and head of house-hold). My point, some of you have failed to grasp the subjective side of the situation– where the objective becomes the decisive motivator–hence the reverse happens of what one would expect. In other words, the unentended becomes the intension.