Hey Everybody! Thanks for giving 49.6% of the earth’s population one day a year to call our own. Perhaps if we think of Mother’s Day as a type of women’s day, that’s two days a year to celebrate women. I guess the other 363 days a year belong to men.
(On second thought, I don’t think Mother’s Day is an international holiday, so it really doesn’t count. That means the score is 364 days for men, 1 for women.)
And guess what? According to Quartz (“a digitally native news outlet…for business people in the new global economy”), “men now outnumber women on the planet by 60 million, the highest ever recorded.”
How can this be? “Left to nature alone, the population on earth would be give or take 50% men and 50% women, according to what’s become known as Fisher’s Principle.”
More from Quartz:
Gender imbalance starts at birth: Both China and India are infamous for widespread gender selective abortions and female infanticide. Both countries have birth sex ratios that are well off the worldwide average. In 2013, China saw 1.11 boys born per girl, India 1.12, as compared to 1.07 worldwide. The availability of affordable prenatal diagnostic techniques has only accentuated the trend, which means the gender gap in the general population is bound to widen in the coming years, as more balanced older generations pass away. In an attempt to break the trend, India has legally banned sex determination before birth in 1994, legislation that has, however, been criticized as ineffective. In 2013, China loosened its one-child policy, one of the main drivers of gendercide.
( Read the entire article at http://qz.com/335183/heres-why-men-on-earth-outnumber-women-by-60-million/.)
What’s going to happen if this trend continues and the number of men on the planet increases further? Will we be reduced to International Women’s Afternoon or International Women’s Moment of Silence?
(I didn’t come up with this rant all on my own; I had a little help from my friend. Actually, this rant was originally hers.)
UPDATE: It just occurred to me to see if there is a Women’s History Month. There is. It’s March. Women’s History Month is now. So I guess women get a whole month of the past to celebrate. To find out more about Women’s History Month 2015, go here: http://womenshistorymonth.gov/.