Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Europan Ocean on 10/08/2013 21:42:40
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In Wikipedia I read that the Hungarian male to female ratio at birth is 1.06 and in Austria it is 1.05.
In Austria at ages 15 to 64 1.01 after is 0.73
Hungary is 0.96 and later 0.59
What does this mean say per 100, and which way is the difference going, in favour of the numbers of women?
If there is a girl drain to slavery, then they must be losing girls in Hungary.
Hungarian stats from 2011
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Women generally live longer than men, and survive birth and the early years better too. By some magic the system compensates by producing slightly more male babies, so that there are roughly equal numbers of middle-aged people.
The "drain to slavery" is negligible compared with early male deaths from accident and lung disease. Not much call for 65 year-old slaves.
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Thanks Alan, and what do the numbers represent?
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Expanding on Alan's answer:
"male to female ratio at birth is 1.06" (or 1.05)
This means that if you don't try to manipulate the sex ratio of your children, there are about 3-7% more live births for males than females (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio#Natural_ratio).
However, in some countries where there is a presumed value of one sex over another (usually male), ultrasound has allowed the sex of an embryo to be determined before birth, and unwanted babies are aborted or abandoned; the birth ratio may be very different from this.
This will cause psychological stress now, and can be predicted to produce other stresses in coming years and decades.
"at ages 15 to 64 [the ratio is] 1.01" (or 0.96)
This is saying that in the age range where people are having children, or raising children, the number of males and females are approximately equal.
For humans, where children are quite helpless at birth, it takes more than one person to raise a child; some say "it takes a family to raise a child", and some even say that "it takes a village/community to raise a child". Evolutionary biologists have come up with a number of "why it is so" stories which might explain why the number of males and females should be roughly equal in this age range, but a major contributor seems to be that young males take more risks, and suffer from more accidents.
"after age 64, [the ratio] is 0.73" (or 0.59)
Around the world, men die younger than women by an average of 4 years, which can be seen by looking at life expectancy figures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy).
The average life expectancy is about 66 years, so you would expect there to be far more women alive in the over-64 age group than men. Causes of this include health conditions, impact of hormones and genetics. (For example, studies of males castrated for sex crimes suggest that male hormones shorten a man's life significantly.)
Studies in traditional societies have shown that outcomes for children are improved if there is at least one grandmother available to help raise them.
There are very few countries where men outlive women on average: currently Tuvalu, Tonga, Kuwait, and Qatar. One could speculate on the causes of this - perhaps limited access to maternal medical care or the social status of women?