Pressures in countries such as China and India for people to produce boys and not girls has led to a spike in gender-based abortions, a shock study has found.
There are now 23.1 million 'missing' females in the world as a result of people terminating pregnancies because the child would have been born female.
Approximately 10.6 million of these so-called 'missing females' are in India and 11.9 million are from China.
Members of the Singaporean researcher team say that the added pressure of China's single-child policy and the desire of parents to have a boy compounded the problem.
A five-year study gathered information from 202 countries around the world, including a dozen nations where boys were favoured over girls at some point in their history.
The study, by a team of researchers in Singapore, found that as a result of the mounting favouritism for male children in some locations. the global gender ratio shifted up to 118:100 in favour of males. It has exasperated an already existing quirk of nature which means for every 200 births, 105 will likely be male. This inherent male bias remains a mystery to scientists but it has long been speculated to balance out how much longer women live compared to men.
