In rural China they had cruel ways in the past of describing baby girls, writes Miriam Donohoe. They were sometimes referred to as "maggots in the rice" or "grass to be stepped on".
With the publication of China's census results comes evidence also, for the first time in recent years, that the lives of boys are still valued above girls.
The head of the state statistics bureau, Mr Zhu Zhixin, revealed that while the census birth gender ratio was not yet available, the figure for 1999 showed that for every 100 female births there were 117 males born. This compared to 111 males to 100 females born in 1990.
Culturally, for hundreds of years it was always important for Chinese families to have a son ahead of a daughter. This was for two reasons - they wanted a boy to inherit and work the land, and a boy to continue the family name.
But the urgency to have boys intensified with the introduction in 1980 of the "one-child" policy aimed at slowing the rise in population. Substantial fines and other penalties are imposed on parents who breach the one-child rule and many families will go to great lengths to ensure their one child is a boy.
Mr Zhu yesterday admitted that there are two reasons for the male-female birth imbalance. One is under-reporting of female births and the other is abortions of female foetuses.
All over China, ultrasound tests are available to parents wishing to discover the sex of their babies. If it is a girl, abortions can be had. It is a highly profitable and illegal practice. It is not known how many thousands of unnecessary abortions it leads to each year.
A flood of baby girls - abandoned by their parents - into Chinese orphanages began in the early 1980s with the onset of the one-child policy. Due to complexities of Chinese bureaucracy only 5,000 of these girls are given for adoption annually. In 1990, 4,349 Chinese babies went to US parents. More and more Irish couples are also adopting babies from China. Recently, there was outcry at the publication of a picture of a dead baby girl in in Yunnan province. According to Ms Lanyan Chen, gender adviser with UNIFEM, the United Nations women's organisation in Bejing, the confirmation of the huge gender birth imbalance is significant. "We have known from academic studies about this imbalance but this is the first time it has been officially acknowledged by a government official," she told The Irish Times.