Good question. This New York Times article is only the latest to document sex selection practices in some countries:

SHARON LaFRANIERE
BEIJING - A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating “an imminent generation of excess men,” a study released Friday said.

For the next 20 years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper, which was published online by the British Medical Journal. “Nothing can be done now to prevent this,” the researchers said.

Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it.

In 2005 , they found, births of boys in China exceeded births of girls by more than 1.1 million. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls.

This disparity seems to surpass that of any other country, they said - a finding, they wrote, that was perhaps unsurprising in light of China’s one-child policy.

They attributed the imbalance almost entirely to couples’ decisions to abort female fetuses.

 Proof that I’m wasting my time with this website? Before reaching that conclusion, review the “marriageable mate” section in my library. As a result of ignoring sex selection practices (abortion or worse), China faces a future political threat as thousands of young men, especially in rural areas, will be unable to find mates.

Let’s be honest here, men do only a few things well, such as playing sports, watching sports on TV and working brutish hours to bring home the bacon. What happens when that last function is taken away, either because our education level has not kept up with a more sophisticated economy or the world dips into a prolonged recession where at least in this country more than 80% of the layoffs are men? Actually, both are happening.

Nobody’s sure, but we’re starting to find out. Or, to be more precise, white middle class women are finding out what it’s like to experience a shortage of “marriageable mates.” This CNN story – OK, it’s a bit superficial. I mean, the column is called The Frisky – explores the personal side of that dilemma.

From the story (photo courtesy of CNN):

(The Frisky) — Bread, bacon, clams - whatever you call it, women are the ones bringing it home these days.

When your boyfriend or husband is unemployed and you’re earning the dough, the relationship could suffer.

According to The New York Times over the past year, as companies from Citibank to GM announced massive layoffs, a full 82 percent of the people getting pink slips have been men. Any day now, women are expected to become the majority of the American workforce.

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Today, the WPost publishes a good piece about the recession’s impact on dating. Women look to men to be reliable providers and this recession, where 80% of the layoffs involve men, has stripped many men of that mantle. Why should women bother?

A quote from one of the men (photo courtesy of the Post):

“Inadequacy,” he said. “I can’t harp on that word enough. I just feel inadequate. Why have I not found a job yet? And what if this happens eight years from now when I’m married and have a 2-year-old? Do I go through this again? Do I trust myself that I can pull it off? And I do, but in the midst of it, you definitely question yourself.”

  The article doesn’t get into the fact that the recession is only accelerating an existing trend. The campus gender imbalances have been producing that same outcome, although at a slower pace. To see where we’re headed here, review the articles in the “social consequences” library on the right.

The recession is the driver, according to this NYTimes story, with 82% of the job losses affecting men. The significance I see here is the recession accelerating a trend already well under way, triggered by education gender imbalances. Most of the impact here will be social (an exception: the tendency of women to avoid careers thought critical to economic competitiveness, such as science and engineering), as in the ability of women to find suitable mates. As the recent NYTimes magazine article illustrated, many women are forging ahead as parents regardless of whether they find a “marriageable mate.”

The Times article:

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This NYTimes Sunday magazine article provides a good profile of women unable to find a suitable spouse deciding to be mothers on their own. It also raises this question: Is it possible to write a magazine-length piece and never once raise the question of why these women lacked suitable mates? Apparently that is possible, as demonstrated in this piece. Could it be connected to the sparseness of similarly educated men? You won’t find out from this piece, but you might get some idea about that while sifting through the stories linked in the “social consequences” library on the right.