I was discussing with a friend about the sex differences in countries like India and China and this idea stroke my mind. Was there more males or females back them? I mean, mainly in Europe during Rome and Medieval times.
I was arguing that it should be more women them men, since men tend to die more often from many different diseases, even more in a time without medicine, and also from accidents and war and things like that, like today.
But my friend argued that as China today male heir were more valued, so fraticide maybe was common. I find it hard to believe because there was no law mandating a single child. But the other argumnent, that women tend to die during childbirth, and women were just pregnant all the time was more sounding.
We have evidence of significant death in childbirth among women due to young pregnancy in much of European history. There are some scholars suggesting female infanticide contributes to skewing of sex ratios as well. This wasn't necessarily true everywhere and everywhen but in, say, medieval Britain women were married young and often died very young. We can find occasional episodes of warfare that leave a deficit of men, but that compares with a much more consistent pattern of early female mortality.
This same pattern can be seen in other societies with comparable levels of wealth (poverty). The subject is an area of active inquiry, and considerable academic debate, but we have a substantial range of findings from tax rolls, inheritances, other records and physical remains that suggest in medieval Britain and Renaissance Italy, for example, scholars have found overall sex ratios was something on the order of of 110 men for 100 women; can be as high as 120 men for 100 women in some samples. This is an amplification of the natural sex ratio at birth, roughly 105 males for 100 females, suggesting that there has been a loss of women over time.
We do have to acknowledge the limitations of the data, and warn against overinterpretation . . .
See:
Bardsley, Sandy. “Missing Women: Sex Ratios in England, 1000–1500.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 53, no. 2, 2014, pp. 273–309.
Sieff, Daniela F., et al. “Explaining Biased Sex Ratios in Human Populations: A Critique of Recent Studies [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 1, 1990, pp. 25–48.
Amartya Sen, "Women's Survival as a Development Problem," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, no. 2 (November 1989)
DE RENZI, SILVIA. “The Risks of Childbirth: Physicians, Finance, and Women's Deaths in the Law Courts of Seventeenth-Century Rome.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 84, no. 4, 2010, pp. 549–577.
Hopkins, M. K. “The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage.” Population Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1965, pp. 309–327.
Angus Deaton, "The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality" Princeton University Press 2015