The demographic imbalance will have an inevitable impact on marriage systems and men may need to delay or forego marriage because they will be unable to find a spouse, observed A recently released UNFPA State of World Population Report, 2020.

This so-called “marriage squeeze”, where prospective grooms outnumber prospective brides, has already been observed in parts of China and India, and affects mostly young men from the lower economic strata. At the same time, the marriage squeeze could result in more child marriages, the report added.

The report said some studies suggest that the marriage squeeze will peak in China between 2030 and 2055, and in India in 2055. The proportion of men who are still single at the age of 50 is forecast to rise after 2050 in China and India, to 15 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively. Recent research has already observed a rising number of “involuntarily single men” in China and India.

Son preference manifested in sex selection has led to dramatic, long-term shifts in the proportions of women and men in the populations of some countries. “Imbalances in the sex ratio at birth in China and India were first observed in the 1980s. Today, the proportion of males under the age of 35 is 11 per cent larger than the proportion of females in these countries,” the report stated.

More than 140 million females are considered missing today as a consequence not only of gender-biased sex selection but also of post-natal sex selection, the report added. Sex selection can distort the composition of a country’s population for generations. The most obvious and immediate effect is the rise in the sex ratio at birth. Over time, these skewed ratios translate into missing girls, missing women and missing elderly women.

Sex ratio imbalances and the marriage squeezes that result from them can exacerbate problems of gender-based violence, including rape, coerced sex, sexual exploitation, trafficking and child marriage — all of which are human rights violations, the report added.