Jon Birger

Writing in the 1970s, Harvard psychologist Marcia Guttentag argued that the rise of the feminist movement in the '60s and '70s was in part a backlash against misogyny spawned by the lopsided sex ratios in her era — one in which women were increasingly objectified and devalued. (Due to the Baby Boom and the traditional age gap at marriage, there were significantly more 22-year-old women than 26-year-old men by the late 1960s.) Were Guttentag alive today, I suspect she’d be making similar arguments about the college gender gap and the rise of the #MeToo movement. FBI and Interpol crime data show a clear connection between higher sexual assault rates and low ratios of men to women. To put it crudely, men seem to value women less when women are in oversupply. The opposite is also true too: Research on China shows that as sex ratios there have skewed more and more male, the only major crime rate that has declined is sexual assault. Jon discusses how lopsided sex ratios have contributed to a culture of sexual harassment and sexual violence — and how sex-ratio science can inform the response.