the focus is on this age category rather than later stages of life for two reasons the first is that threefifths of missing women go missing during birth and infancychildhood missing girlswomen at later stages of the life cycle reflect not only discriminatory practices against women but also poor institutions such as lack of healthcare or water and sanitation infrastructure world bank thus the measure used here specifically focuses on a sexselection bias in the period of early infancy where the bias is caused by abortion infanticide and the possibility that young girls are systematically less cared for in early childhood anderson and ray the data comes from mitchell and the un