Abstract

The topic of “missing girls” in historical Europe has not only been mostly neglected, but previous research addressing this issue usually took the available information too lightly, either rejecting or accepting the claims that there was discrimination against female children, without assessing the possibility that the observed child sex ratios could be attributable to chance, mortality differentials, or registration quality. This article contributes to this discussion by (1) using a novel dataset of historical child sex ratios that covers a large part of the European geography between 1700 and 1926; and (2) explicitly considering the effects of random variability, demographic variation, and faulty enumeration in the analysis. Our results provide evidence that some of these European populations had child sex ratios well above the levels usually considered “natural”. Although part of this variation is indeed shown to be due to random noise and structural features related to infant mortality differentials and census quality, some of the observed sex ratios are too high to be attributed solely to these proximate factors. Thus, these findings suggest that there are behavioural explanations for some of the unbalanced sex ratios observed in our data.

摘要

在历史上的欧洲，“失踪女孩”这个话题不仅大多被忽视，而且之前针对这个问题的研究通常对现有信息过于轻率，要么拒绝要么接受关于存在歧视女性儿童的说法，而没有评估这种可能性的可能性。观察到的儿童性别比可归因于机会、死亡率差异或登记质量。本文通过以下方式对这一讨论做出了贡献：（1）使用了一个新的历史儿童性别比数据集，该数据集涵盖了 1700 年至 1926 年间欧洲地理的大部分地区；(2) 在分析中明确考虑随机变异性、人口统计变异和错误枚举的影响。我们的结果提供了证据，证明这些欧洲人口中的一些儿童性别比例远高于通常被认为是“自然”的水平。尽管确实表明这种变化的一部分是由于与婴儿死亡率差异和人口普查质量相关的随机噪声和结构特征，但一些观察到的性别比率太高而不能仅归因于这些近似因素。因此，这些发现表明我们的数据中观察到的一些不平衡的性别比例存在行为解释。