This has been an odd article to read. It sounds like it's about 10 years too late, and didn't pass my smell test. I empathize with the stories being told, the unjust tragedies of the subject and the persistence of of dowries. But, the statistics are maliciously sourced.

> By 2008, dowry was near-universal in rural areas, and many regions had seen alarming rates of dowry inflation.

"World Bank found the average net dowry had been "remarkably stable" over time, with some inflation before 1975 and after 2000. And the researchers found an average real net dowry of 27,000 rupees ($361). [1] At an average of $361, dowry sounds more like a formality than a real expense. Any research into dowries also has to weigh it by what it means as a real economic burden."

Dowries consume a substantial proportion of household savings and income: in 2007, the average net dowry in rural India was equivalent to 14% of annual household income. I can't imagine that 14% of a poor family's income in 1 year would play a substantive role in sex selection.

IMO, dowries are a more prominent problem in middle-class societies where the woman is deemed to be 'marrying up'. In those cases you will see numbers that would devastate any family, but I find it to be a natural commodification of a marriage which India has always seen from a more transactional lens than than of irrational love. It is reprehensible in the same way that being a gold-digger is reprehensible anywhere. It used to be doubly reprehensible when it was socially enforced, but that has become increasingly difficult in middle class communities as women have gotten more educated, selective and aware of their own rights. (the anti dowry and anti-domestic violence laws are very harsh on paper in India)

> The expansion of dowry coincides with other worrying changes. Rates of sex-selective abortion appear to have increased in almost all states between 1981 and 2016, especially among wealthy and educated women. Female representation in higher education is rising, yet female labor-force participation, as of 2021, sits at a paltry twenty-three per cent, declining from twenty-eight per cent in 1990.

This is the clearest sign of journalistic mal-practice. We have numbers till 2021, and they have sharply declined since 2016. [2] [3] Rates of sex-selective abortion have clearly declined especially among those who can afford ultra sounds.

> Female representation in higher education is rising, yet female labor-force participation, as of 2021, sits at a paltry twenty-three per cent, declining from twenty-eight per cent in 1990. A 2015 study published in The World Bank Economic Review showed that women were less likely to work when their husbands were educated and had high incomes, again underlining the paradoxical effects of affluence. India seems to value women less than when it outlawed dowry, sixty years ago.

I am not sure I agree with the conclusion. As India has moved from an agricultural economy [4] (where women were defacto employed) to physical migrant labor (defacto male employment), there is a natural lack of fresh jobs for low skilled women. While it is a scathing indictment of the one-sidedness of labor force changes in India, it isn't caused by sexism. The article makes it sound as if all trends are pointing downwards, but look at the numbers [5] and they've been sharply rising from 2016 - 2021. Hilariously, a lot of India's problems are due to labor force protections. Neighboring Bangladesh was able to vastly increase their female labor force participation by allowing exploitative textile factories to be built. This led to a massive rise in safe and non-physical jobs for women.

> The Indian state of Punjab, where the majority of the world’s Sikhs live, has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the country

The decline in Sikh female infancide has been quite stark [6]. Long way to go, but an directionally excellent.

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I know that : "all stats for women are looking up in India since 2016" is not a narrative anyone wants to buy right now. But there is cause for genuine enthusiasm. There are also signs that the govt. might actually weaken some of the labor restrictions, and we might see some Bangladesh style rise in women-favored jobs, but the optics of "worse labor protections" makes it political kryptonite.

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[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57677253

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/08/23/changes-in-s...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/08/23/indias-sex-r...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Share_of_labour_force_emp...

[5] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locat...

[6] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/site...