The Sex Effect by Ross Benes

Author:Ross Benes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2017-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

HONG KONG’S MAN SHORTAGE

While mainland China has a shortage of women, Hong Kong actually has a female surplus, with roughly 855 men for every 1,000 women.84 The gap is predicted to widen to 763 men for every 1,000 women by 2036. According to a 2013 article in the Atlantic titled “Hong Kong’s Troubling Shortage of Men,” this disparity is driven by cultural norms and immigration. Many of the surplus women in Hong Kong are female migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia. Also, there is a cultural norm where men are expected to marry women with lower socioeconomic status and women are expected to marry men with higher socioeconomic status. But many of Hong Kong’s women are educated and independent. So even though the raw numbers tip in men’s favor, many Hong Kong men have trouble finding a wife with lower earning power than their own.85

According to Yong Cai, a University of North Carolina demographer studying China’s sex ratios, “Men at the bottom of society get left out of the marriage market, and that same pattern is coming to emerge for women at the top of society.”86 As a result, men from Hong Kong import more traditional and less educated women from mainland China to marry. These types of marriages account for more than 30 percent of all registered marriages in the city.87

Instead of rejoicing about living in an area where the odds of finding a mate are highly in their favor, Hong Kong men import women from the mainland, further reducing the number of women in an area already short on females. The surplus women in Hong Kong are left searching for men with higher socioeconomic status, who are in short supply. The popularity of plastic surgery and liposuction has increased on the island, and reality TV shows follow lonely women in their thirties seeking advice from “love coaches,” which are trends that can be traced to the intense competition for wealthy, successful men.88 With too few women in mainland China and too many in Hong Kong, there’s a market inefficiency for single people in China’s dating scene to exploit—if they can move past cultural norms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.