The "most male" and "most female" countries

We generally assume there are roughly the same number of men and women in the world, but this often isn't the case, especially in certain parts of the world. This map of each country's sex ratio demonstrates that very clearly. "Sex ratio" is another way of saying males per 100 females. A sex ratio above 100 means more men, and a sex ratio below 100 means more women. On the map, red means female and blue means male. Before you cancel me for being cisnormative, remember that sex and gender are two different things. Sex is biological and is determined by your chromosomes, while gender is social and determined by how you express yourself. Although there are some intersex people, sex the vast majority of the human race can be accurately classified as either male or female, so this map paints a fairly complete picture. How are trans people counted in these statistics? I'm not sure, but their numbers are too small to significantly skew the data.
In every country, slightly more boys are born overall. However, males are more likely to die at every age, so their demographic advantage gradually wears off over time. In the US, for example, men outnumber women among every age group under 30, the two sexes are relatively even among people in their 30s and 40s, and after the age of 50 there are considerably more women. The older an age group gets, the fewer men there are, to the point where there are almost twice as many women as men who survive past the age of 80. This is why women slightly outnumber men throughout the West, including Latin America. In developing countries, where fewer people survive to old age, this has less of an impact on the sex ratio.

Men have shorter life expectancies because they do most of the dangerous jobs; they're encouraged to take stupid risks by toxic masculinity; they're more vulnerable to suicide, homicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction; and their lives are considered to be more disposable than women. There are some areas where these factors are more intense, noticeably Eastern Europe, where there's been an epidemic of alcoholism and mental health issues among men. In Russia, for example, women's life expectancy is about 78 (similar to the US and China) and men's is about 67 (similar to South Africa and Pakistan). As a result, in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltics, there are only around 86 men for every 100 women. The huge gender gap in Eastern Europe can also partially be explained by the fact that so many men have migrated to Western Europe to earn a better living. The same is true for Portugal--still further evidence that it's secretly an Eastern European country.

Almost all societies have historically been patriarchal and still are to some degree, so men have always had an easier time getting prestigious jobs, andc consequently male children are more valued since they give families a higher chance of escaping poverty. Throughout history, this has resulted in some families killing or abandoning baby girls, or more recently, getting abortions when they found out it was a girl. It's well-known that this was common in China back when the One Child Policy was in place, but if India and Pakistan are any indication, poverty is just as big of a factor as legal restrictions in causing families to avoid female children. The United Nations estimates that, as a result of sex-selective abortion and infanticide, there are around 72 million missing girls in China and 43 million in India. Nepal, despite its cultural similarities to India, is the complete opposite, having a lower sex ratio than any country on earth at 84 men per hundred women. I'm completely baffled by this and have no theory to explain it.

However, culture also definitely plays a big role in the problem of female infanticide. 95% of the world's missing girls are in either China or India, which is remarkable even when you consider how populous those countries are. This can largely be explained by the fact that they are two of the only countries in the world that are not majority Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist. All three religions strongly condemn infanticide. Most Buddhist countries (Southeast Asia) and Christian countries (Europe, the Americas, Oceania, and the southern half of Africa) have more women, while most of the Islamic world has remarkably even sex ratios. The only exceptions are Pakistan and Afghanistan, where pre-Islamic traditions of female infanticide still have a lingering effect.

The Arabian Peninsula is also an exception, but for very different reasons. There are more than three times as many men as women in Qatar, and around twice as many in the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman. Kuwait has a sex ratio of 158, and Saudi Arabia's is 137. This is because of the massive population of migrant workers, mainly from East Africa and the Indian Subcontinent, who come for jobs in oil extraction, construction, cleaning, and all the other menial labor the native Arabs don't want to do. Migrants make up more than half the population of several of these countries--including a whopping 88% in the UAE--and almost all of them are men. Similar factors make Equatorial Guinea, another small oil-rich country, and Djibouti, which is full of shipyards and military bases, both heavily male. Norway's oil is possibly the reason it's one of the only countries in Europe with more men.

Since men are much more likely to die in battle, I expected war-torn countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, or South Sudan to be heavily skewed towards women, but they are not. I wouldn't be surprised if there's just not enough data, seeing as it's rather difficult to collect reliable info in the middle of a warzone.

This data comes from Gapminder, which is a great source for all kinds of statistical information about different countries. Expect it to be cited often on this blog.