News “Publication of Gender Biased Books” - from a statistical perspective

Holiday Special Update II

Today’s blog gives a statistical perspective on the article published in BBC Asia on 15 April 2017 titled “India’s enquiry into sexist text books” and also on BBC radio journal talk ”Gender biased books”.

Gender biased is not gender balanced. Gender biased means giving preference to one specific gender. The article published in BBC Asia on 15 April 2017 “India’s enquiry into sexist text books” and talk program in BBC radio journal “Gender biased books” try to sensitize us to the importance of having gender balanced views for the sustainable development of the society. But what is gender balanced? Gender balanced attribute implies, maintaining the natural balance between number of male and number of female with respect to that attribute. Sex ratio measures this ratio between the number of male and the number of female.  It is normally defined as the number of males per 100 females. Sex ratio at birth measures this ratio between male and female at the time of birth. Under normal conditions and in the absence of any external biological intervention the sex ratio at birth is between 103 and 105.  This implies that there are normally 103 – 105 male births to every 100 female births. So if there are 100 births then 50.74% [(103/203)*100] are male and 49.26% are female. This is the gender balance given by nature.

For the publications to be gender balanced same ratio has to be maintained implying that for every 10 books published in the market 5 – 6 should portray male perspective of an issue and 4- 5 books should portray female perspective of the same issue. Or if there are 10 stories published in a book, 5-6 stories should have male in a lead role and 4-5 should have female heroines. So when a reader reads the entire book, he/she has an idea of how a man would think and also of how a woman would tackle an issue. Reading gender balanced books result in development of impartial views on any issue.

According to census 2011, sex ratio is 94 for Nepal. There are 94 male per 100 female when whole population of 2011 is taken into consideration.  Census 2011 tells that sex ratio in the age 00- 04 years is 105. So this drop from 105 to 94 is attributed to increased life expectancy of females in all age groups. Vast rural urban differential existing in many developing countries including Nepal is also reflected in the sex ratio.   Sex ratio is 104 for urban areas and 92.3 for rural areas. Male from rural areas migrate for education and employment to urban areas. Thus sex ratio in urban areas is higher and more than 100 in comparison to sex ratio of rural areas.

So what is gender balanced and what is gender biased? If sex ratio is close to 100 with respect to an attribute then that attribute is gender balanced and if sex ratio is much less than 100 or much more than 100 then it is gender biased.