[lbo-talk] where are the women?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/20/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> I was just looking at the sex ratios for the populations of various
> countries, and discovered an amazing thing - the extraordinarily low
> percentage of women in certain Arab countries. Where did all the
> women go?
>
> I understand the predominance of the fSU countries at the other end,
> though - the men drank themselves to death.
>
>
> COUNTRIES RANKED BY SHARE OF FEMALES IN POPULATION
> 2005 data, World Bank
>
> lowest
> ------
> United Arab Emirates         31.9%
> Qatar                        32.7
> Kuwait                       40.0
> Bahrain                      43.0
> Oman                         43.8
> Saudi Arabia                 46.0

These are all Gulf states, artificial states, where non-citizens
outnumber citizens in the labor force.  Check the sex ratios of
non-citizen workers.  If men outnumber women greatly among the
non-citizen workers in the Gulf states, that brings down the shares of
females in the Gulf state populations a lot.  The question in this
case, unlike India and China for instance, is not what happened to the
missing women but why the Gulf states need so many more foreign male
workers than foreign female workers in the labor force (which is easy
to guess -- oil and construction are predominantly men's jobs).

So, don't start a match-making service hitching Russian women to Gulf
Arab men -- you'll be disappointed.  :->
-- 
Yoshie