Thirty years ago, the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen studied countries with skewed gender ratios and calculated that there were 100 million missing women in the world as of 1990. His study appeared in the New York Review of Books that year.11  In 2020, demographers working with the United Nations Population Fund revised that number upward to 143 million.12  That means that 3.7 percent of the 2020 global female population is demographically missing, the same percentage as in 2010.  That is because the number of missing women is growing at exactly the same rate as the female population.  The number of missing women is expected to grow to 150 million by 2035 before starting to slowly decline.12a

Each year, 3.2 million women disappear from the population due to the causes listed above.  The annual loss of females breaks down like this:12b

Feminicide is the killing of women for cultural reasons where there is no equivalent reason for killing men.  Feminicide includes intimate partner murder, dowry murder,  honor killing, and the killing of women associated with rival groups (gangs, tribes) as a strike against the group’s men.  The total loss of female life due to feminicide is just under 100,000 per year.12c  The asymmetry of feminicide leads advocates to define it, somewhat confusingly, as “killing a woman because she is a woman.” While women do occasionally kill their male partners, they generally do not do so as the culmination of behaviors intended to intimidate and control.