So Much for Sadie Hawkins...

I remember being in grade school and learning what a "Sadie Hawkins Dance" was: ladies' choice. Girls picked the guys. I thought this was a totally rad concept ( mostly because I had more than a few bad haircuts in grade school) and couldn't wait for the chance to be the asker rather than waiting to be the ask-ee. The trouble with most of my years as a grade school student, waiting for my moment in the sun at the Sadie Hawkins dance, was the fact that in a class of 13, there were only 5 boys. And two of them were named David. Slim pickin's. We never did have a Sadie Hawkins dance but if we had, many of us gals would have gone dateless. So much for Sadie Hawkins.

It was just by unfortunate chance that my class was tipping the scales when it came to girl power, but the imbalance was obvious to all of us. I doubt if any of us put much thought into it, we just went about our school day, the 13 of us for almost our entire grammer school experience without really questioning it.

Well, in other parts of the world, nearly 20 years later people are starting to notice that the scales are tipping in the opposite direction . In schools in countries like China, India and others, a Sadie Hawkins dance is out of the question; a pipe dream. But this time the reason isn't too few boys, it's too few girls. WAY too few.

There's this thing called the sex ratio. It's important. Super important. The sex ratio is number of males to females in a population ( thank you Wikipedia ). A good, healthy sex ratio for us humans is 105:100, that's 105 boys for every 100 girls. A ratio Sadie Hawkins would be happy to support.

Unfortunately, what we are seeing --on a global scale-- is a shift away from nature's preferred ratio to something a little less...balanced. Many countries are experiencing a major tip of the scales when it comes to sex ratio, this is almost exclusively the result of gender selection practices that tend to crop up when countries begin to experience economic prosperity.

According to Mara Hvistendahl, author of  Unnatural Selection (stop what you are doing and get your copy now...I'll wait), in 2011 India's ratio was 112:100 while China was a whopping 121:100. That's a huge discrepency. SO big, as a matter of fact, that the ENTIRE WORLD is now experiencing a tipping of the sex ratio scales. This is officially everyone's problem. Hvistendahl notes that China and India account for 1/3 of the entire global population, and with all the missing girls, have shifted the ratio from "105 to a biologically impossible 107." She calls the growing gap between the number of males and females "unrivaled in human history."

The problem isn't just in India and China, its spreading to other countries as well...

Why does this matter? Because too few females leads to problems like bride-buying, sex trafficking and other grave human injustices.

I'm still reading Hvistendahl's book. I'm going down the rabbit hole, uncovering the sad truth about a huge global problem that will effect the world's children...my children. I've said it before, as I learn more I will share it with you. In the mean time visit www.giveherlife.org to learn more about the problem, and to find out how to become part of the solution.