ORIGINAL PAPER Ancestral ecological endowments and missing women Gautam Hazarika 1 & Chandan Kumar Jha 2 & Sudipta Sarangi 3 Received: 8 February 2018 /Accepted: 25 October 2018/ # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract This paper examines the relationship between ecological endowments in antiquity and contemporary female to male sex ratios in the population. It is found that there are proportionately more missing women in countries whose ancestral ecological endow- ments were poorer. This relationship is shown to be strong even after ancestral plough use, the timing of the Neolithic Transition, and many other potentially confounding factors are controlled for. Similar results are also obtained using district-level data from India. Keywords Gender inequality . Historical factors . Resource scarcity . Culture JEL codes D1 . J1 . Z1 1 Introduction This study infers that there was greater gender inequality in well-being in pre-history in regions less endowed with ecological resources and hypothesizes that the underlying Journal of Population Economics https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-018-0723-y Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno * Gautam Hazarika gautam.hazarika@utrgv.edu Chandan Kumar Jha jhack@lemoyne.edu Sudipta Sarangi ssarangi@vt.edu 1 Department of Economics and Finance, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, One West University Blvd, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA 2 Madden School of Business, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214, USA 3 Department of Economics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA