The terms female genocide, female gendercide, or just “gendercide,” all refer to the worldwide elimination of women and girls that is directly attributable to oppression and lack of rights — to inequality between the sexes.

The two largest causes are

  1. the selective abortion of female fetuses in countries where sons are strongly preferred over daughters
  2. the inability of older women to access food, shelter, and medical care as successfully as men.

Additional causes include lethal neglect of unwanted girls, preventable maternal death, and femicide (intimate partner murder, dowry murder, honor killing).

Most gendercide passes under the radar. For very young females, it occurs within the privacy of the family against an almost voiceless victim.  This is the case with sex-selective abortion and the neglect of unwanted girls, which together account for 50% of the annual loss of females.

The other 50% occurs among adult women — much of it resulting from customs, laws, and economic barriers that force women into dependency and redirect their wealth to male relatives.  For example, in much of the world, women farm the land that their husbands own. They cannot access the wealth that generates, nor can they acquire the land upon the death of their husbands.  It goes to the male next of kin.  In other places, women are permitted to inherit, but their inheritances are given to their husbands and male in-laws.  The result is that wealth is concentrated in the hands of men, and that some older women, especially widows, become so poor they simply do not survive.

Femicide is the violent and intentional murder of a woman in a context that rarely applies to a man — for example,  intimate partner murder, dowry murder, honor killing.  It is the part of gendercide we see in the news, but it accounts for just 3% of the annual loss of women.  It is the visible part of the gendercide ice berg, pointing to a much larger loss of females that is submerged and invisible.