In the late 1970s, a Ph.D. student named Monica Das Gupta was conducting anthropological fieldwork in Haryana, a [relatively prosperous] state in the north of India. She observed something striking about families there: parents had a fervent preference for male offspring. …. In fact, the bias against girls was far more pronounced there than in the poorer region in the east of India where Das Gupta was from. ….
[In India and China] girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas. Having more money, a better education and (in India) belonging to a higher caste all raise the probability that a family will discriminate against its daughters. The bias against girls applies in some of the wealthiest and best-educated nations in the world, including, in recent years, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It also holds among Indian immigrants in Britain and among Chinese, Indian and South Korean immigrants in the United States. ….
Why should this be? [Das Gupta] … found that it was not true that all daughters were mistreated equally. A firstborn daughter was not typically subjected to inferior treatment; she was treated like her brothers. But a subsequent daughter born to an educated mother was 2.36 times as likely to die before her fifth birthday as her siblings were to die before theirs — mainly because she was less likely to see a doctor. It turned out that a kind of economic logic was at work: with a firstborn girl, families still had plenty of chances to have a boy; but with each additional girl, the pressure to have a son increased. ….
What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women … have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy. ….
Tina Rosenberg, “Idea Lab: The Daughter Deficit”, New York Times Sunday Magazine, 23 August 2009.
This article profiles the work of anthropologist Monica Das Gupta, who currently works for the World Bank.
Journalist Tina Rosenberg concludes “development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination” because higher incomes offers parents “new opportunities to discriminate against living girls. After all, if people are very poor, boys and girls are necessarily deprived equally ….” She softens this assertion a bit, noting also that “development can eventually lead to more equal treatment for girls: South Korea’s birth ratios are now approaching normality.”
Das Gupta’s own studies of Asia, with co-authors Woojin Chung and Li Shuzhuo, reveal that child sex ratios peaked in the mid-1990s in South Korea, are peaking in China and India, and “in many sub-national regions are beginning to trend towards less masculinization”. Economic growth is clearly associated with – though it does not necessarily cause – a reduction in discrimination against girls. Rosenberg is overly pessimistic when she asserts “development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination”.
This still leaves an anomoly. How can we reconcile negative correlation across households and space between income and discrimination, and the positive correlation over time between these very same variables?
