A Plea for Real-World Research: A journalist who turns to academic papers finds more questions than answers
It started, like many tasks that morph into huge undertakings, with a modest goal. I’d been assigned a magazine article on China’s gender imbalance, and I was sitting at my desk in Shanghai to write it. I had spent a few weeks in Suining, a booming county in Jiangsu province with a shockingly high sex ratio at birth—three boys for every two girls, according to 2007 government figures (a natural ratio is 105 boys for every 100 girls). I had amassed a stack of notebooks and newspaper clippings, which were now strewn on the floor around my chair, and I wanted to make sense of them…