Nobel laureate Esther Duflo warns China on massive gender imbalance

Beijing [China], March 11 : Warning China that its massive gender imbalance will become a "fundamental demographic problem", Nobel laureate Esther Duflo urged Chinese society to change its attitude toward women's contribution.
"China must address gender imbalance to tackle the demographic crisis," said Nobel Prize-winning economist Duflo in an interview with Caixin
"The ratio of boys to girls still continues to be extraordinarily high," added Duflo.
"A lot of this one-child generation with a huge lopsided number of boys are now trying to look for partners and there are just not enough women," said the professor of poverty alleviation and development economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gender equality is still a challenge in China as there is a large gap in the treatment of women in the country, said a media report.
In its report, European Times said that over 70 years down the line, Chinese women lag as compared to men in almost all arenas. Gender equality remains a distant goal and conditions are, in fact, getting worse.
The country once enjoyed one of the highest rates of women labour force participation in the world. Nearly 3 in 4 women worked as recently as 1990 but now that figure is just 61 per cent, as per the International Labour Organization.
There is a noticeable lack of women in managerial or leadership positions, European Times reported.
As per the World Economic Forum (WEF), only 17 per cent of senior managers, officials and legislators in China are women. Then the official retirement age for women in China is at least 5 years earlier than men, creating more financial uncertainty for them, said the report.
The report further said that nowhere is the gender gap more apparent than in Chinese politics. In 70 years, neither a single woman has been appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest governing body, nor has any woman held the presidency.
Also, none of the 31 provincial-level governments is led by a woman. In more than 70 years, only six women were members in the wider 25-member Politburo.
Notably, the WEF ranks China 78th in terms of the political involvement of women.
The report highlighted the country's one-child policy and said that China's controversial One-Child Policy and a cultural bias towards a male child have been cited as the main reasons behind this discrepancy.
The policy, introduced in the late 1970s, was meant to slow down China's rapid population growth. The now-defunct policy has attracted wide criticism for encouraging gender-selective and forced abortions in this largely patriarchal society. Now the country has an estimated 31 million "surplus" men, European Times reported.
As per the Human Rights Watch, in 2018, nearly 20 per cent of the Chinese national civic service jobs posted included requirements such as "men only," "men preferred," or "suitable for men."
Even at home, women have been dealt a rough blow as a new divorce law tramples upon their chances of owning property after marriage even as the country goes through a property boom, as per the report.
The marriage rate has fallen to the lowest point since Xi came to power and the birth rate has dropped to an unprecedented level in the country's 70-year history.
In Beijing in 2017, authorities reported one divorce for every two marriages. Chinese women have become more proactive in protesting for their rights, too.