Compare methods

	Missing Women Estimation	Life Table
Field	Gender Studies	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1990	1984
Originator	Amartya Sen	Demographic/actuarial tradition; Chiang
Type	Demographic accounting estimate	Age-structured mortality estimator
Seminal source	Sen, A. (1992). Missing women. BMJ, 304(6827), 587–588.	Chiang, C. L. (1984). The Life Table and Its Applications. Robert E. Krieger Publishing. ISBN: 978-0-89874-565-2
Aliases	Missing Women, Excess Female Mortality Estimation, Sen Missing Women Method	Mortality Table, Actuarial Table, Survival Table, Yaşam Tablosu
Related	2	3
Summary	Missing women estimation quantifies the number of women and girls who are absent from a population because of gender bias in mortality and, in some settings, sex-selective abortion. Introduced by economist Amartya Sen in 1990 and 1992, the method compares the observed female population (or female deaths) with the number expected under a benchmark sex ratio that would prevail absent discrimination. The resulting deficit — famously estimated at more than 100 million worldwide — is a stark demographic measure of cumulative anti-female bias.	A life table is a systematic, age-structured summary of the mortality experience of a population. It traces a hypothetical cohort of births — conventionally 100,000 — through successive age intervals, recording how many survive, how many die, and how many person-years are lived at each interval. The method was formalized in its modern probabilistic form by Chiang (1984), synthesizing centuries of actuarial and demographic practice into a rigorous statistical framework applicable to human and biological populations alike.