Will a shortage of women lead to war?

Where have all the females gone?

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Historically, societies where men outnumber women have not been nice places to live.
It's a man's world - more than ever - and that spells doom for the future.
As the global population hits seven billion, experts are warning that skewed gender ratios could fuel the emergence of volatile "bachelor nations" driven by an aggressive competition for brides.
The precise consequences of what French population expert Christophe Guilmoto calls the "alarming demographic masculinisation" of countries such as India and China as the result of sex-selective abortion remain unclear.
But many demographers believe the resulting shortage of adult women over the next 50 years will have as deep and pervasive an impact as climate change.
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The statistics behind the warnings are grimly compelling.
Nature provides an unbending biological standard for the sex ratio at birth of 104-106 males to every 100 females. Any significant divergence from that narrow range can only be explained by abnormal factors.
In India and Vietnam the figure is around 112 boys for every 100 girls. In China it is almost 120 to 100 - and in some places higher than 130.
And the trend is spreading: to regions like the South Caucasus, where Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia all post-birth ratios of more than 115 to 100, and further west to Serbia and Bosnia.
Global awareness of the problem was raised back in 1990 with an article by the Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen that carried the now famous title: "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing."
Demographers say that figure is now more than 160 million - women selected out of existence by the convergence of traditional preferences for sons, declining fertility and, most crucially, the prevalence of cheap prenatal sex-determination technology.
As many as half a million female foetuses are estimated to be aborted each year in India, according to a study by British medical journal The Lancet.
"Earlier villagers had to go to the city to get a sonogram (ultrasound)," said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the non-profit Population Foundation of India. "Today sonographers are going into the villages to cater to people who want sons."
Even if the sex ratio at birth returned to normal in India and China within 10 years, Guilmoto says men in both countries would still face a "marriage squeeze" for decades to come.
"Not only would these men have to marry significantly older, but this growing marriage imbalance would also lead to a rapid rise in male bachelorhood ... an important change in countries where almost everyone used to get married," he said.
How that change might manifest itself is hotly debated, although nearly everyone agrees there is no foreseeable upside.
Some forecast an increase in polyandry and sex tourism, while others predict cataclysmic scenarios with the rise of male-surplus societies where sexual predation, violence and conflict are the norm.
A particularly alarmist note was sounded several years ago by political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, who wrote that Asian countries with too many men posed a security threat to the West.
"High-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonisation or war," they said.
Mara Hvistendahl, a correspondent for Science magazine and author of the recently published Unnatural Selection, says fears of full-scale wars are unfounded, and points out that India remains a thriving democracy, despite its shockingly high gender imbalance.
However she does agree with the underlying premise.
"Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," Hvistendahl stressed.
"Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent," she said, adding that leaders in both China and India have spoken of the threat gender imbalance poses to social stability.
UN agencies have issued similar warnings about the correlation between a scarcity of women and increases in sex trafficking and marriage migration, albeit with certain caveats.
"The data is really limited," said Nobuko Horibe, Asia-Pacific director of the UN Population Fund. "It is very likely that this marriage squeeze would lead to these phenomena ... but it's very anecdotal at this stage."
But while more and more red flags are being raised over the long-term implication of skewed sex ratios, few solutions are being offered.
Sex-selective abortion is illegal in both China and India, but officials say the law is incredibly difficult to enforce.
There is "no silver bullet," admits Guilmoto, who believes the first priority is to make sure the problem is properly publicised - and not just in the developing world.
"In some countries in eastern Europe, people are absolutely not aware of what is going on," he warned.
AAP

A ride on the wild side

Organisers describe the three-wheeled auto rickshaw provided for a rally across India as the "ultimate long-distance off-road machine".
A driver calls it a "hair-dryer-powered tin can on shopping cart wheels".
A sense of humour is as important as a sense of adventure and a willingness to raise cash for charity for anyone signing up for the Rickshaw Run, a 3,500 kilometre odyssey organised by The League of Adventurists International.
The British-based company says it is "not just hell bent on fighting to make the world less boring but also raising massive buckets of cash for charities".
The Adventurists provide teams with one of India's famed Bajaj 145cc rickshaws, start and finish lines and a two-week deadline.
In return, each team is required to raise a minimum of 1,000 pounds (about $1,500) for a charity chosen by the company, while also paying a rickshaw 'hire' fee of 1,000 pounds.
The Rickshaw Run is held three times a year. The autumn run this year, from September 11 to September 24, was in benefit of Frank Water, a charity building water-treatment stations in poor village communities in India.
The organisers insist they are not "hand holders". Teams of up to four people are given the three-wheeled, hand-cranked, open-sided vehicles -- also known as tuk-tuks, a few tips on what to avoid, and the rest is up to them.
The route, accommodation, rough roads, wild traffic, monsoon floods, cows in the middle of the highways and mechanical and medical emergencies must be handled by the teams themselves.
"That's the adventure," said Matt Davis, an India Adventurists staff member.
At the start of the autumn run at Shillong in northeastern Meghalaya state, 74 teams were presented with their rickshaws, brightly pimped in team colours and with names such as "By Hook or by Tuk" and "Tucking Awesome".
They were all supposedly in good working order.
On the first day three teams lost their wheels.
"We did not know anything was wrong until we saw the wheel roll past us on the mountain road," a team member from Tucking Awesome said. "That was the start of our nightmare."
At one stage Tucking Awesome could only drive at 20 kilometres an hour -- way short of the maximum speed of 60kmh a rickshaw could achieve on a rare good road.
Another team, Right Place, Right Time, also lost a wheel on the first day then went on to have its chassis split in two, its brakes fail, accelerator cable snap and an electrical fire.
They were not alone in their misery. Team Brits Abroad, broke down "a hundred times", complaining that their trip was "not an adventure. Breaking down is not an adventure!"
The breakdowns, getting lost or having to put the rickshaw on a riverboat because the highway "ran out" for Rangeela Racers, were all part of the experience.
Other dangers were more testing.
Some teams were robbed and beaten up in Bihar, a state troubled with Maoist rebels and bandits. Others sought to avoid the state by putting their rickshaws on a train and skipping it all together.
Despite the challenges most teams tried to stay positive. Team Gandhi Warhol wrote on their blog: "Watched sunrise over Mt. Everest this morning in Darjeeling.
"Also, broken: brakes, rear lights, front fog lights, spark plug, chassis, horn, fuel intake. Service and MOT (roadworthiness test) complete. On we go through Bihar."
Not all who start the run make it to the end. One team left their rickshaw at a police station at the end of the first day, telling the organisers "it was not what we signed up for".
But the sense of achievement for those teams that did cross the finish line in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan was tremendous.
"I never thought we would make it," said Jennifer Morris, a Habibi Babes team member. "After days of breakdowns, driving in the dark and being driven off the road by big trucks, we had almost lost hope.
"But we made it, we made it!"
The Adventurists also host the Mongol Rally, Mongol Derby (on horseback) the Africa Rally, Ice Run (1,500km across the frozen Siberian wilderness on 650cc Ural motorbikes and sidecars), among others. Charity always plays a part.
"We figure since we are rather fond of adventuring in the world we should do our bit to look after it," the Adventurists say.