1. Son bias and poverty dynamics
The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) Son Preference
Sub-Index draws on Amartya Sen’s 1990 work on ‘missing
women,’ or the number of women who could have been
expected had girls received equal health care, medicine and
nutrition. Sen hypothesised that international distortions in
sex ratios equate to as many as 100 million missing women
and can be explained by female foeticide and ‘gendercide’ –
the systematic and often lethal neglect of and underinvestment
in girls and women. Klasen and Wink (2003) further developed
this approach to estimate sex ratio
1
differences over time and
space, and it is their methodology that underpins the country
assessments in the SIGI rankings.
In this chapter, however, we conceptualise intra-household
gender biases more broadly. We include differential
investments in, and care and nurture of, boys and girls from
conception, with implications across a spectrum of negative
developmental outcomes, from mortality through to human
capital development deficits, time poverty and psychosocial
ill-being. To signal this broader understanding of unequal
treatment between sons and daughters, we refer to the social
institution as ‘son bias.’ It is important to note from the
outset that imbalanced sex ratios tend to be limited to certain
geographical regions (Asia and the Middle East and North
Africa region). However, our argument is that general intra-
household differentials between sons and daughters are more
widespread and that there is good evidence on a number of
indicators of this gender bias across regions.
The chapter begins by reviewing the factors that underpin
son bias, and then turns to a discussion of the multidimensional
impacts of such practices on girls’ experiences of poverty
and vulnerability. We recognise that son bias is not shaped
by poverty alone, and indeed is found among upper wealth
quintile groups in some countries and communities.
2
However, we focus our discussion here on linkages between
poverty, vulnerability and son bias over the life-course and in
intergenerational terms. The second half of the chapter focuses
on promising initiatives aimed at challenging the norms and
practices that underpin son bias.
Son bias
The
patterning of son bias
The most typical manifestation of son preference is the relative
neglect of daughters, although the most extreme form is
female infanticide
3
– the intentional killing of baby girls. In
many cases, however, female infanticide has been supplanted
by sex identification testing and sex-selective abortion,
shifting postnatal discrimination to prenatal discrimination
(Klasen and Wink, 2003). A 2008 World Bank study drawing
on Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data estimated son
preference based on the likelihood of families having another
child if they have only daughters (Filmer et al., 2008). It found
that, in Europe and Central Asia, families are 9.4 percentage
points more likely to have an additional child if they have only
daughters. In South Asia, they are 7.8 percentage points more
likely, in the Middle East and North Africa 5.8 percentage
points more likely and in East Asia/Pacific 3.7 percentage
points more likely. They found no evidence of son preference
by this measure in sub-Saharan Africa (surveys did find a
subjective preference for sons but this did not translate into
demographic ratios) or Latin America (where there seems to
be a preference expressed for daughters).
This is largely borne out by SIGI findings (with the
exception of Europe and Central Asia), as Table 1 indicates.
Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa
have considerably smaller scores, indicating lower prevalence
of son preference. These regional trends do, however, hide
significantly higher ratios in a small subset of countries,
especially India and China.
4
Presence of other siblings and
sibling order also have a strong effect on measures taken to
ensure that future children are girls. For example, in India the
first child is much less likely to be aborted for being a girl than
subsequent children (Jackson, 2010). Overall, neglect of girls
is generally more severe for later-born girls and for girls with
elder sisters, and this is particularly the case in rural areas
(Klasen and Wink, 2003). In India, the sex ratio of second-
born children has been estimated at 716 to 1,000 boys in the
incidence of the first child being a girl, compared with an
excess of girls – 1,140 girls to 1,000 boys – if the first-born is a
boy and 910 girls to 1,000 boys for first born children (Sahni et
al., 2008).
32
2 | Son bias
2. Accounting for son bias
A substantial body of evidence shows that son bias is shaped
by a complex interplay of economic, socio-cultural and
demographic factors. Adding to this complexity is the fact
that intra-household attitudes and behaviours intersect with
societal-level gender biases and in turn perpetuate both ‘private’
and ‘public’ sphere discriminatory norms and practices. In this
section, we provide an overview of the key explanations for
the survival and malleability of this social institution, and the
ways in which these intersect with poverty dynamics.
Economic factors
The Economist noted in its March 2010 Leader on the perils of
son preference that gendercide affects rich and poor alike, but
that there is a substantial body of evidence highlighting the
economic rationale for son bias. Arguments centre around the
economic contributions that sons are able to make over their
lifetime to the family on the one hand, and the costs daughters
exact on the other (see Box 9). Sons are expected to maintain
financial and social ties to the household throughout their lives
and, in developing country contexts, where social security
systems are underdeveloped, many parents rely on their
sons’ future earnings for their old-age security (Jayaraman
et al., 2009; Wang, 2005). Indeed, 51 percent of respondents
in a fertility survey in Hubei province identified the primary
motivation for a son as the desire for old-age support, with
continuation of the family line a distant second (20 percent)
(Ding and Zhang, 2009). Moreover, county-level pension
programmes in rural China have been found to lower the
sex ratio at birth by 9 percent (Ebenstein and Leung, 2010).
5
Patrilineal inheritance systems spanning a wide range of
cultural and religious traditions (from Confucianism to Islam,
from Hindu law to Kenyan inheritance customs) also mean that
sons inherit property,
6
exacerbating discrimination against
girls and women and motivating prioritised investments in
boys (Jackson, 2010; Quisumbing, 2007) (see also Chapter 1 on
Discriminatory Family Codes).
The economic ‘rationality’ of these practices is often
reinforced by the fact that daughters are only transitory
members of their natal families before their marriage, upon
which they move to and contribute to the families of parents-
in-laws, typically becoming physically and psychologically
isolated from their birth home (Chu et al., 2006). Moreover,
female employment is often undervalued, making men
potentially more productive future ‘assets.’ This is especially
the case in rural areas, if, as discussed in Chapter 3 on Limited
Resource Rights and Entitlements, women are not involved
in commercial agriculture and/or do not have property
rights (Gupta and Dubey, 2006). In other contexts, however,
parents may seek to mobilise resources from older unmarried
daughters to improve the family budget in general and the
educational outcomes of sons in particular. This can be paid
work (often unskilled or semi-skilled factory work in urban
areas) or household work, which frees parents up to work
longer hours (Chu et al., 2006).
In cultures which practise dowry payments, daughters
are often also seen as an economic liability on account of the
high cost of weddings, as highlighted by adverts for mobile
abortion clinics in India which cry ‘Pay 50 rupees now to save
50,000 rupees later’ (Basu and Jong, 1999). Diamond-Smith
et al. (2008) note that one-fifth of women surveyed identified
dowry payments as the reason they did not want daughters.
Rather than declining with the onset of modernity, these costs
are escalating over time, and dowry payments may equate to
as much as two-thirds of a household’s assets (Nolan, 2009)
or several times more than total annual household income
(Anderson, 2007). This owes in part to expectations that girls
will be educated, with associated costs; the increasing demands
that a consumer-oriented culture exerts; new economic trends,
especially increasing international remittances, which are
inflating dowry demands; as well as the potential opportunity
for social mobility which marriage represents, especially for
poor low-caste families (Diamond-Smith et al., 2008; Pande and
Astone, 2007). It is important to note that this is particularly
burdensome in households where, because of parental desire
for a son, there are multiple daughters, as parents continue
to have children in an effort to have sons (Bélanger, 2010;
Lundberg, 2005).
Finally, it is important to point out the linkages between
female income and education (Fuse, 2008). Qian (2006)
found that increasing female income, holding male income
Table 1: SIGI son preference scores by geographical region
Overall average
Latin America and Caribbean
0.01
Europe and Central Asia
0.03
Sub-Saharan Africa
0.04
East Asia and Pacific
0.19
Middle East and North Africa
0.38
Source: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=GID2