TY - JOUR
T1 - Gender Discrimination and Excess Female Under-5 Mortality in India
T2 - A New Perspective Using Mixed-Sex Twins
AU - Kashyap, Ridhi
AU - Behrman, Julia
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Kieron Barclay, Jere Behrman, Sonia Bhalotra, Monica Caudillo, Seema Jayachandran, Stephanie Koning, Felix Tropf, and Abigail Weitzman for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge support for this article through the Global Family Change (GFC) Project ( http://web.sas.upenn.edu/gfc ), which is a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford (Nuffield College), Bocconi University, and the Centro de Estudios Demograficos (CED) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Funding for the GFC Project is provided through NSF Grant 1729185 (PIs Kohler & Furstenberg), ERC Grant 694262 (PI Billari), ERC Grant 681546 (PI Monden), the Population Studies Center and the University Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the John Fell Fund and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. Ridhi Kashyap also acknowledges support from the Leverhulme Trust within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Son preference has been linked to excess female under-5 mortality in India, and considerable literature has explored whether parents invest more resources in sons relative to daughters—which we refer to as explicit discrimination—leading to girls’ poorer health status and, consequently, higher mortality. However, this literature has not adequately controlled for the implicit discrimination processes that sort girls into different types of families (e.g., larger) and at earlier parities. To better address the endogeneity associated with implicit discrimination processes, we explore the association between child sex and postneonatal under-5 mortality using a sample of mixed-sex twins from four waves of the Indian National Family Health Survey. Mixed-sex twins provide a natural experiment that exogenously assigns a boy and a girl to families at the same time, thus controlling for selectivity into having an unwanted female child. We document a sizable impact of explicit discrimination on girls’ excess mortality in India, particularly compared with a placebo analysis in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls have a survival advantage. We also show that explicit discrimination weakened for birth cohorts after the mid-1990s, especially in northern India, but further weakening has stalled since the mid-2000s, thus contributing to understandings of how the micro-processes underlying the female mortality disadvantage have changed over time.
AB - Son preference has been linked to excess female under-5 mortality in India, and considerable literature has explored whether parents invest more resources in sons relative to daughters—which we refer to as explicit discrimination—leading to girls’ poorer health status and, consequently, higher mortality. However, this literature has not adequately controlled for the implicit discrimination processes that sort girls into different types of families (e.g., larger) and at earlier parities. To better address the endogeneity associated with implicit discrimination processes, we explore the association between child sex and postneonatal under-5 mortality using a sample of mixed-sex twins from four waves of the Indian National Family Health Survey. Mixed-sex twins provide a natural experiment that exogenously assigns a boy and a girl to families at the same time, thus controlling for selectivity into having an unwanted female child. We document a sizable impact of explicit discrimination on girls’ excess mortality in India, particularly compared with a placebo analysis in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls have a survival advantage. We also show that explicit discrimination weakened for birth cohorts after the mid-1990s, especially in northern India, but further weakening has stalled since the mid-2000s, thus contributing to understandings of how the micro-processes underlying the female mortality disadvantage have changed over time.
KW - Excess female child mortality
KW - India
KW - Son preference
KW - Twins
KW - Under-5 mortality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091608441&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/s13524-020-00909-0
DO - 10.1007/s13524-020-00909-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 32978723
AN - SCOPUS:85091608441
JO - Demography
JF - Demography
SN - 0070-3370
ER -