By Robert B. Zoellick
Imagine if a city of almost four million people disappeared every year. A Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Yokohama. It would be hard to miss.
Yet it goes largely unnoticed that almost four million girls and women “go missing” each year in developing countries when compared to their female counterparts in developed countries. About two-fifths are never born; a sixth die in early childhood, and more than a third die in their reproductive years.
High mortality rates are just one of many barriers to equality between men and women, as argued in the
