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Some of my earliest posts are related to natural resources, where they occur, and the implications regarding their presence or absence in a Fantasy world. Works of Fantasy and Science Fiction have done this fairly frequently: desert worlds, ocean worlds, realms of endless night, and so on. Taking a commonly used resource and figuring out a workaround, as well as its societal implications, is an engaging exercise. However, we need not be so extreme in our applications. A simple unbalancing of the norm is all that you need to have a significant impact.
In my recent reading, I encountered the statement, "Among adults... the female sex seems to have been in the minority, particularly in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, at a ratio of eighty to ninety females for every one hundred males." (Fossier). He goes on to say that it is this imbalance which created a market (in a manner of speaking) for ladies that had men hunting the hedgerow country for them, or doing battle in tourneys for their hands. Older widowers would have to wait in line behind the younger men (unless they were rich, of course), which makes me think of Fiddler on the Roof (damn, now that song is going through my head). Anyway, we see how a slight market imbalance can lead to all sorts of societal implications.
I can hear many of you thinking, "What about the dowry?" Well, that practice doesn't really mean what you think it means (or at least what I thought it meant). First of all, in some cultures there is the complementary institution of the bride-price (where the prospective husbands put up the cash instead of, or in addition to, the dowry). Secondly, the dowry was intended to act as support for the wife and children, and was actively managed by the women of early India. In some cultures the dowry was expected to be held in trust, in case of divorce. In others, it was intended as an emergency fund. While the dowry may have been employed at times to buy a rich trader's way into the aristocracy, or to make one's daughter more attractive to suitors, it was not always thus.
Anyway, while we shouldn't think of women as a commodity, their relative lack in a society creates a significant effect throughout the community. The modern man will happily make a complete ass of himself for the woman he desires, now imagine if there were that much more competition! The "distinguished old bachelor" starts to become a more reasonable choice when you think of the consequences of this shift. Ladies would have much more control over this system as their "value" rose. Mistreatment and abuse would decrease. They would gain an increased political and economic voice. This did, in fact, happen in certain areas during the Hundred Years War. Unfortunately, as the ratios balanced back out things went back to normal.
One clever approach to the a reversal of this idea is covered in the Chanur Saga, by C. J. Cherryh. The Hani are a feline people, with a culture extrapolated from the social workings of lions. In a clan, there are females, children, and one adult male (the "Lord"). The male is big and powerful, having to fight off rivals for clan leadership, but the ladies do almost all of the work (both physical and mental). Over time, the males have essentially bred for size and aggressiveness, while the ladies are smaller and tend to be more intelligent (though we find that this may be more a function of nurture and nature).
Humans might not fall into such leonine patterns, but what would the fallout be? Would human men just become bigger assholes (from a historically repressive perspective) if there were truly "two girls for every boy"? If the ratio really started to skew to making women more dear, where there was one women for every ten men, would we become more like bees with their queen? Hmmm I seem to have gone over some of this in the Creature Culture posts, but thinking about how nature has already put us through some of these societal stresses really fires my imagination.
As Fossier tells us (see the intro), the lack of women had a variety of social implications. Some men had to quite literally go searching for a mate, not some specific woman, but to find any available woman. Women were promised in marriage much younger than they had been, even before child-bearing age. Even spinsters (yup, I did a post on that too) had significant economic value for their families. This unbalancing of the genders set men on the move and improved the lot of the ladies in both social and economic realms.
While gender balance has been the focus of this post (and I still don't view women as possessions, promise), this line of thinking can be widely applied in your world building. If steel is rare, smiths are revered and snake-men will pillage for it (see: "Conan the Barbarian"). When wood is scarce, you find another fuel for the fire (peat, dung, what have you). Things do not need to be completely lacking in order to have a societal impact. Conversely, some things are valuable to us because they are so rare. After living in Brazil for a little while, where avocados were free and available on the tree outside, their price in PA is really galling. In Brazil, it seemed like the old ladies always knew which ones were perfectly ripe and ready to be plucked. Old ladies in Czech know where to find the best mushrooms in the forest. Have you seen the prices for morels, much less truffles? Yeah, sorry, it's lunch time.
Anywho, add some imbalances to your peoples to make things interesting. Maybe your female-poor folks become raiders who carry off their female victims. Slavery is not an original American idea, perhaps there is a trade if balances in only one of your planet's cultures are significantly skewed. Maybe your abundance of women rise to dominate the economic and political scene, while the men become pampered dandies. Perhaps your slight abundance of women simply encourages more to take up arms and defend the homeland. It's your world, I'm just sharing my take on the available tools. Enjoy.
Dowry Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
Dowry in India - http://www.hitxp.com/articles/history/origin-dowry-system-bride-woman-india-british/
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