
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
Mara Hvistendahl
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
Mara Hvistendahl
Unnatural Selection was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a Slate Best Book of 2011, and a Discover Magazine Best Book of 2011. Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval. Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- Hachette UK
- Year
- 2011
- ISBN-13
- 9781586489915
- Genre
- Science & Technology
- Topics
- Gender ratio imbalanceSex selectionDemographics and social consequences
Awards
- Pulitzer Prize for General NonfictionShortlistedMajor(2012)
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and TechnologyShortlisted(2011)
If you liked Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, you could also like these

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado-Perez
2 wins · 22 score

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Cat Bohannon
0 wins · 6 score

Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds
Cordelia Fine
1 win · 8 score

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Dan Wang
0 wins · 3 score

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
Barbara Demick
0 wins · 4 score

Children of Prometheus
Christopher Wills
0 wins · 3 score

Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender
Frans de Waal
0 wins · 3 score

The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan
Jenny Nordberg
1 win · 5 score

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children
Hannah Barnes
0 wins · 7 score

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
Florence Williams
1 win · 8 score

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage
Rachel E. Gross
0 wins · 6 score

China Shakes The World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future – and the Challenge for America
James Kynge
1 win · 8 score

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Susan Faludi
1 win · 12 score

Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex
Olivia Judson
0 wins · 4 score

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics
Mae. Ngai
1 win · 14 score