There is a popular claim that six million people - nearly all women - were killed in the middle ages. The agency was the Pope and the Catholic church; the means was defined in the papal proclamation called the Maleus Maleficarum, the hammer of witches. This horror of gynocide was supported - or at least ignored - by the whole of European civilization; the witch hunts of the inquisition were indeed monstrous.
Of course, if there really were six million women slaughtered by society, that would have been roughly one out of six souls killed, or every third woman alive. Best estimates place the population of Europe at forty to fifty million people. That number - six million - is manifestly wrong.
More reliable estimates place the number of women killed at between two-and four-hundred thousand. That's a far cry from millions, but it is still an enormous number of women murdered, with their horrific deaths countenanced by the highest moral authority of Europe. Countenanced? The church engineered the gynocide. The numbers aren't so important as the simple fact that at least once, society culled its own numbers for purely social and moral (?!!) reasons.
Suppose, rather than goodness and right, you posit simple pragmatic necessity to justify your universal gynocide. In the Middle Ages, the impact of humanity on the global environment was minimal; the ecosystem healed what people corrupted. In modern times, we are already deeply involved in destroying the very mechanism by which nature heals itself. Industrialization is the superficial culprit; behind that there are simply too many humans for our finite ecosystem to sustain. A past article in Scientific American suggested that 600 million people could be supported in our ecosystem, assuming they wanted (as we all do) an American, upper-middle-class lifestyle. We are, if you haven't noticed, way past that now.
Are you part of the excess population?
-Chrutli