gender issues include all aspects and concerns related to women's and men's lives and situation in society, to the way they interrelate, their differences in access to and use of resources, their activities, and how they react to changes, interventions and policies.
female infanticide is the deliberate killing of newborn female children. In countries with a history of female infanticide, the modern practice of sex-selective abortion is often discussed as a closely related issue. Female infanticide is a major cause of concern in several nations such as China, India and Pakistan. It has been argued that the low status in which women are viewed in patriarchal societies creates a bias against females.
In 1978, anthropologist Laila Williamson, in a summary of data she had collated on how widespread infanticide was, found that infanticide had occurred on every continent and was carried out by groups ranging from hunter gatherers to highly developed societies, and that, rather than this practice being an exception, it has been commonplace. The practice has been well documented among the indigenous peoples of Australia, Northern Alaska and South Asia, and Barbara Miller argues the practice to be "almost universal," even in the West. Miller contends that female infanticide is commonplace in regions where women are not employed in agriculture and regions in which dowries are the norm. In 1871 in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin wrote that the practice was commonplace among the aboriginal tribes of Australia.
In 1990, Amartya Sen writing in the New York Review of Books estimated that there were 100 million fewer women in Asia than would be expected, and that this amount of "missing" women "tell[s] us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women." Initially Sen's suggestion of gender bias was contested and it was suggested that hepatitis B was the cause of the alteration in the natural sex ratio. However it is now widely accepted that the numerical worldwide deficit in women is due to gender specific abortions, infanticide and neglect.
In seventh-century Arabia, before Islamic culture became established, female infanticide was widely practiced. This is attributed by scholars to the fact that women were deemed "property" within those societies. Others have speculated that to prevent their daughters from a life of misery, the mothers would kill the child. With the arrival of Islamic rule the practice was made illegal.
