China, Japan, and India have a few things in common.
They're all hugely powerful and populous Asian countries.
They also have restrictive gender roles. Put more bluntly, women and girls — at least until very recently in some urban centers — have have been second-class citizens compared to men in the best case and actively oppressed in the worst case.
As in:
- In Japan, women are given the choice between being eschewing careers or having to pull insane hours at the office and taking care of everything at home, because of tradition.
- In China, the long-running (and thankfully repealed) one-child policy made daughters a liability. The policy prompted an estimated 330 million gender-related abortions.
- In India, the preference for sons (even without formal government mandates) has led to many "missing girls." A Lancet study found that India loses 500,000 girls to sex-selective abortion every year, with many more abandoned.
Looking at these trends from a demographic perspective, a truth emerges: oppressing women imperils a population.
In Japan, the economic modernization of traditional society has lead to a situation where women must choose to wholly dedicate themselves to family or career, with little overlap. This has contributed to a long-declining birthrate and a "demographic time bomb" where nowhere near enough babies are being born to support an aging population.
The preference for sons over daughters in China and India has lead to a population imbalance. There are 33 million more men in China than women, and 37 million more men than women in India. This has lead to "marriage squeeze": There aren't marriage-ready young women to go around, so there are increasing numbers of single young men. It's like dating in San Francisco, but for two countries with over a billion people each.
Therein lies the takeaway: patriarchy, while beneficial to dudes in most ways, ends up oppressing everybody.
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