Between 1.7 and two million Cambodian died during the war years in the early 1970s and during the years of Democratic Kampuchea, from 1975 to 1979. During the Khmer Rouge period, people died of starvation and disease as well as from execution. More women than men survived the traumas of this period. Women are better able to survive conditions of severe malnutrition, fewer women were targeted for execution because of connections to the old regime, and fewer women were killed in battles. Many women told me that they survived those years of horror because they had to care for their children (see Ebihara and Ledgerwood 2002).
During the 1980s and early 90s, men continued to be drained off from society to go to serve as soldiers. This was particularly evident in rural areas where one could enter a village and find no men between the ages of about 15 and 50. Many men were killed or disabled, others might still have been alive but were off with their military units, with resistance factions at the border, or hiding from conscription.
What this meant was large numbers of widows and older women who had not married before the Khmer Rouge period who subsequently never married. There were significantly higher numbers of women than men in the adult population. The most commonly cited figures in the early 1990s were that 64% of the adult population was female and women head 35% of the households nationwide. Ledgerwood (1992), found a figure of 25% female-headed households in certain areas. Other parts of the country that were particularly devastated by fighting, on the other hand, ratios were higher. In the wet-rice growing area where we conducted research, widows headed 41% of the households. Other studies have noted that it was not rare to find villages where the figure was 50% (UNICEF 1990:111).
What this meant was a severe shortage of male labor power. Women were forced to take on various tasks that were previously performed primarily by men. This included tasks in the countryside such a plowing and other preparations for cultivation. It also included work in urban areas, particularly employment within the state bureaucracy. According to Boserup, in 1962, less than 1% of Khmer women were employed in "clerical" or "administrative" positions (1970:241?) In 1990 one third of the Khmer state employees were women (UNICEF 1990), though the higher in rank, the lower the female to male ratio. It is not clear the degree to which the sex ratio within the state bureaucracy is returning to pre-war patterns now that the national sex ratio is returning to normal.
Throughout the 1990s, the gender ratio evened out dramatically. Nationwide statistics for 1995 showed a population over twenty years of age that was 48 percent male and 52 percent female; the 1998 census showed a total population that was 51.8 percent female (UNFPA 1995: 5-7, National Institute of Statistics 1999). In part this reflects the extremely high birth rate during the 1980s and 90s, 2.5 to 3 percent annually. Ebihara and Ledgerwood have also argued that the rapid correction of these statistics must reflect in part the undercounting of men during the 1980s and early 90s. After the Paris Peace Agreement and the 1993 UN sponsored elections, many men returned home from military service (whether or not they were recorded as formally having left their posts). Men also returned from the resistance factions on the border. And men were also free to live openly in rural villages again because of the end of conscription (see Ebihara and Ledgerwood 2002:279-280).
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