Preliminary Programme

Gender discrimination, in the form of sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and the mortal neglect of young girls, constitutes a pervasive feature of many contemporary developing countries. Despite the dramatic magnitude of the “missing girls” phenomenon, the historical experience of European countries has received little attention. The conventional narrative argues that there is little evidence of gender discrimination resulting in excess female mortality in infancy and childhood. However, new preliminary evidence reconstructing infant and child sex ratios, the number of boys per hundred girls, in 19th-century European countries suggests that this issue was much more important than previously thought, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe. It should be noted that excess female mortality was not necessarily the result of ill-treatment of young girls. In high-mortality environments as those present in the past, a discrimination on the way girls were fed or treated when ill, as well as the amount of work which they were entrusted with, resulted in more girls dying from the combined effect of undernutrition and illness. Relying on data from The North Atlantic Population Project and the Mosaic Project, this paper analyses the behavior of millions of households both in Western and Eastern Europe in order to trace the importance of missing girls in historical Europe between 1750 and 1930. This article also addresses to what extent unbalanced sex ratios in infancy and childhood are the result of structural socio-economic features, such as the lack of labour opportunities for women and the prevalence of particular family types, or temporary shocks associated with mortality crises. Given the growing literature on the negative link between gender inequality and economic development, unveiling hiding patterns of gender discrimination in the past becomes of paramount importance for understanding the diverse long-term economic trajectories within Europe. (Show less)

In Denmark, like in most places of Western Europe, women have had a higher life expectancy than men during the last 200 years. A fact that may have contributed to the lack of interest in exploring the excess mortality of females in some places and age groups, which actually are present in the aggregated nineteenth century Danish vital statistics. The aggregated statistics does however not show evidence of the phenomenon of “missing girls” as first described by Amartya Sen in the in 1980s through analysis of sex ratios among infants but no analyses have looked at other ages. On the contrary, there is a consistent pattern of higher mortality among male infants up to the age of three years. However, there is also clear evidence that girls in all Denmark and young women before the childbearing age at some places experienced higher mortality than boys and young men did during the nineteenth century. Recent research internationally has suggested that such excess female deaths may be caused by cultural and social variables that influenced women disproportionately, such as differential resource allocation affecting nutritional status and particular diseases linked to female occupations (tuberculosis in textile factories).
This paper has two aims. 1) We will use the original lists of yearly returns from local clergymen reporting the number of baptisms and burials and census microdata at selected times, to explore whether, in nineteenth century Denmark, there is evidence of missing infant girls in the traditional sense at some places at parish level even if they are not showing in the main administrative units used in the published statistics. 2) We will study patterns of sex-ratios and excess mortality among girls and young women based on population wide reconstructed life courses from our Link-Lives project, using direct measures of mortality, which include both census information and causes of death. (Show less)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the discrimination against rural Spanish twin girls was evident and sharp from the moment of their birth. With this objective, we are going to use parish registers and the family reconstitution method of 14 Spanish rural villages. By analysing the sex ratios at birth in this area, we were able to observe that the sex ratio at birth of the twins (around 125) was much higher than the sex ratio at birth of the whole population (around 107). Even though the parish records are already showing a problem of missing girls at the time of registering the baptisms. Why was there such a big difference between the number of male-twins and female-twins? Did these differences affect only the registration of girls or are they a reflection of a discriminatory society and especially harsh with twin girls?
When we analyse the survival of the twins, we find that all the twins have a 'twin penalty', but this penalty is not especially important among girls (compared to boys). However, when we analysed the mean age at death of adults in 50 years period, we clearly observed that the twin women had a shorter lifespan, both in comparison with the twin men and with the rest of the women. Therefore, our results could be indicating that discrimination against girls (missing girls’ theory) affected even more the twin girls. The twin girls are not only scarce in the parish registers but, if we follow their lives (according to the registers), they presented extra problems possibly related to feeding and care during their childhood. In a rural world with a preference for males, being a twin girl had an extra burden of negative consequences. (Show less)