Breaking down the question

The question has three components. First, identify the issues relating to male migration — the social and demographic consequences of men moving, mostly for work, leaving families behind. Second, analyse its impact on birthrate. Third, and critically, the phrase does it necessarily result in skewed sex ratio asks you to test a causal claim rather than assume it.

The word necessarily is the hinge. It warns that a facile equation of male out-migration with a distorted sex ratio is wrong. A strong answer separates two distinct measures — the fertility rate affected by spousal absence and the sex ratio determined mainly by sex-selective practices and mortality — and shows that migration touches the first far more directly than the second.

The demographic foundations are set out in the note on components of population growth.

How to approach it

Address each part in turn, and reserve a firm analytical conclusion for the causal question. Distinguish the sending region, where women and children are left behind, from the receiving region, where the migrant sex ratio is genuinely male-skewed.

  • Issues of male migration — left-behind families, altered gender roles, remittance dependence, social costs.
  • Impact on birthrate — spousal separation lowering fertility, offset by return visits and family reunification.
  • The sex-ratio question — migration skews the ratio only at destination, not the national ratio, which is driven by sex selection.

Model answer

Male migration — the predominantly male movement of labour from rural and less-developed regions to towns, cities and abroad — generates a distinctive set of social issues at both ends of the journey.

At the sending end, migration produces left-behind families. Wives, children and the elderly remain in the village while the earning male is absent for long periods. Women take on new responsibilities in farming, household headship and decision-making, which can enhance their autonomy but also increase their burden and exposure to insecurity. Children may grow up with an absent father, and the aged lose customary support. Communities become dependent on remittances, which raise consumption and investment but also create vulnerability to the migrant's fortunes. At the receiving end, migrants concentrate in crowded, male-dominated settlements with poor living conditions, weak social ties and their own health and welfare problems.

The impact on birthrate flows chiefly from spousal separation. When a husband is away for extended periods, the couple's exposure to conception falls, which can depress fertility in the sending region — a recognised effect of circular labour migration. This is, however, partly offset by periodic return visits timed around festivals and agricultural seasons, and by eventual family reunification when migration becomes permanent. In many cases migration therefore lengthens birth intervals and modestly lowers fertility rather than eliminating it, and where whole families migrate the effect on birthrate largely disappears.

The crucial question is whether male migration necessarily produces a skewed sex ratio. The answer is no, and the distinction must be drawn carefully. Migration certainly skews the sex ratio of a place — the destination city or industrial belt shows a heavy surplus of men, while the sending village shows a surplus of women. But this is a redistribution of the existing population, not a change in the number of males and females born. The national sex ratio, and especially the child sex ratio, is determined by very different forces — the son preference expressed through sex-selective abortion, female infant neglect and higher female mortality, which Amartya Sen analysed in his account of the missing women of South Asia.

Male migration does not create these adverse practices; a region can have heavy male out-migration and yet, because the birth sex ratio depends on parental preference and technology, its child sex ratio may be perfectly normal or even favourable to females. Conversely, a region with little migration can have a badly skewed child sex ratio because of entrenched son preference. Migration merely rearranges adults across space; the biological sex ratio is set at birth and in early childhood by cultural and medical factors.

In conclusion, male migration raises real issues of left-behind families, changing gender roles and remittance dependence, and it tends to lower fertility in sending areas through spousal separation. But it does not necessarily skew the sex ratio in the demographically meaningful sense. It distorts the sex composition of particular locations while leaving the underlying birth sex ratio untouched — a distinction that separates a careful demographic answer from a mistaken one.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners set this question to reward analytical precision about causation. The decisive move is engaging the word necessarily and separating the sex ratio of a location — genuinely skewed by migration — from the birth and child sex ratio, which is driven by son preference and sex selection rather than by migration. Invoking Sen on the missing women signals command of the real determinants.

Weak scripts assume male migration automatically produces fewer women and a distorted ratio, conflating the two ideas. Strong scripts treat the three parts in order, note that fertility falls through spousal separation but is offset by return visits, and conclude firmly that migration redistributes adults across space without altering the sex ratio at birth. A structured answer distinguishing sending and receiving regions lifts the response into the top band.