Yes, the United Nations (UN) monitors missing women and sex ratios at birth through its Population Fund (UNFPA) and its Development Program, issuing reports on a regular basis. The UNFPA works with gendercide-affected countries to change attitudes about women and help regulate the technology involved in fetal sex selection. The issue of gendercide comes up regularly at UN conferences, but neither conferences nor resolutions have had much impact on the ground. In short, the UN does a good job of monitoring the problem but has encountered difficulty in changing behavior.

In 2008 the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became the first Indian leader to speak about the issue, calling it a “national shame.” A few doctors were prosecuted for sex determination. Billboards went up to persuade parents to keep their daughters, and in certain states, parents who gave birth to daughters received small securities that they could cash when their daughters reached eighteen.25

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, he addressed the problem of gendercide in his inaugural address, calling it a “form of mental illness” and pleading for young parents to keep their daughters. In 2015 he announced an initiative called Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao — Save a Girl, Educate a Girl — and released funds to a select group of Indian states with particularly distorted sex ratios, distributing them via the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Women and Children, and the Ministry of Health.

In 2019 The Times of India published a scathing review of Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, faulting the program for spending 43% of funds on media campaigns, while spending just 5% on girls’ education and 5% on girls’ health. Financial accountability was lax, with funds almost certainly lost to graft. The program did not hire local women for jobs where a local woman was needed for credibility and persuasive power.  Lastly, Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao did not evaluate its own effectiveness.25a

​It is hard to know if the program worked. Some states saw improvements in the sex ratio at birth, while others saw deterioration.25b The country-wide average remains abnormally high, stuck at more than 111 male births per 100 female births.26

Chinese officials, too, have spoken of the problem and experimented with billboard campaigns and monetary rewards for parents of girls, usually at the local or provincial level. In 2006, a program of monetary rewards, called Care for Girls, was implemented on a nationwide scale. It gave $31 to parents who kept their daughters. This program and other initiatives helped China reduce its sex ratio at birth (SRB) from an all-time high of 121 male births per 100 female births in 2004, 29 down to 116 male births for every 100 female births in 2014.28

In 2015, China’s one-child policy became a two-child policy, and in 2021, it became a three-child policy.  These changes were made, not to correct the sex ratio, but to encourage more births so that there would be enough future workers to support China’s large elderly population.  The new policies have secondarily helped reduce the sex ratio.  Nevertheless, China’s SRB remains highly elevated at 111 and is exceeded only by Azerbaijan at 114.29a  A normal sex ratio at birth for China would be 105 or 106 male births per 100 female births. (Nature gives us more males than females at birth; historically, these numbers evened out by age 21 due to male infants’ greater susceptibility to childhood illness and male adolescents’ risk-taking behavior.)30