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The Daughter Deficit

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  • The Daughter Deficit

    THE DAUGHTER DEFICIT
    By Tina Rosenberg

    New York Times
    August 19, 2009

    In the late 1970s, a Ph.D. student named Monica Das Gupta was
    conducting anthropological fieldwork in Haryana, a state in the
    north of India. She observed something striking about families there:
    parents had a fervent preference for male offspring. Women who had
    given birth to only daughters were desperate for sons and would keep
    having children until they had one or two. Midwives were even paid less
    when a girl was born. "It's something you notice coming from outside,"
    says Das Gupta, who today studies population and public health in the
    World Bank's development research group. "It just leaps out at you."

    Das Gupta saw that educated, independent-minded women shared this
    prejudice in Haryana, a state that was one of India's richest
    and most developed. 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. She decided to study the issue in Punjab,
    then India's richest state, which had a high rate of female literacy
    and a high average age of marriage. There too the prejudice for sons
    flourished. Along with Haryana, Punjab had the country's highest
    percentage of so-called missing girls - those aborted, killed as
    newborns or dead in their first few years from neglect.

    Here was a puzzle: Development seemed to have not only failed to help
    many Indian girls but to have made things worse.

    It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today,
    but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries,
    more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics
    would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be
    expected. (In China in 2007, there were 1.73 million births - and
    a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically
    and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the
    education that their brothers receive.

    Among policymakers, the conventional wisdom is that such selective
    brutality toward girls can be mitigated by two factors. One is
    development: surely the wealthier the home, the more educated the
    parents, the more plugged in to the modern economy, the more a family
    will invest in its girls. The other is focusing aid on women. The
    idea is that a mother who has more money, knowledge and authority in
    the family will direct her resources toward all her children's health
    and education. She will fight for her girls.

    Yet these strategies - though invaluable - underestimate the complexity
    of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India
    are poor. But in both nations, 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. In the last
    few years, the percentage of missing girls has been among the highest
    in the middle-income, high-education nations of the Caucasus: Armenia,
    Azerbaijan and Georgia.

    Nor does a rise in a woman's autonomy or power in the family
    necessarily counteract prejudice against girls. Researchers at the
    International Food Policy Research Institute have found that while
    increasing women's decision-making power would reduce discrimination
    against girls in some parts of South Asia, it would make things worse
    in the north and west of India. "When women's power is increased,"
    wrote Lisa C. Smith and Elizabeth M. Byron, "they use it to favor
    boys."

    Why should this be? A clue lies in what Das Gupta uncovered in
    her research in Punjab in the 1980s. At the time, it was assumed
    that parents in certain societies simply did not value girls. And
    in important ways, this was true. But Das Gupta complicated this
    picture. She 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. The effect
    of birth order that Das Gupta discovered has now been confirmed in
    subsequent studies of missing girls.

    What unites communities with historically high rates of discrimination
    against girls is a rigid patriarchal culture that makes having a son a
    financial and social necessity. When a daughter grows up and marries,
    she essentially becomes chattel in her husband's parents' home and
    has very limited contact with her natal family. Even if she earns
    a good living, it will be of no help to her own parents in their
    old age. So for parents, investing in a daughter is truly, in the
    Hindi expression, planting a seed in the neighbor's garden. Sons,
    by contrast, provide a kind of social security. A family with only
    daughters will also likely lose its land when the father dies: although
    women can legally inherit property, in areas of north India and China,
    they risk ostracism or even murder if they claim what is theirs. And
    sons are particularly important to mothers, who acquire power and
    authority when they have married sons. Sons, according to Chinese
    custom, are also needed to care for the souls of dead ancestors.

    What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women
    face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women -
    but they 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.

    Thus development can worsen, not improve, traditional
    discrimination. This can happen in other ways too. With the access
    it brings to cutting-edge technology, development can also offer
    more sophisticated and easier options for exercising old-fashioned
    prejudice. In China and in the north and west of India, for instance,
    the spread of ultrasound technology, which can inform parents
    of the sex of their fetus, has turned a pool of missing girls
    into an ocean. The birth of girls has long been avoided through
    infanticide, which is still practiced often in China. But there
    are even more couples who would abort a pregnancy than would kill a
    newborn. Ultrasound has been advertised in India as "pay 5,000 rupees
    today and save 500,000 rupees tomorrow." In both countries, it is
    illegal to inform parents of the sex of their fetus, and sex-selective
    abortion is banned. But it is practiced widely and rarely punished.

    Finally, because higher education and income levels generate more
    resources, development offers new opportunities to discriminate
    against living girls. After all, if people are very poor, boys
    and girls are necessarily deprived equally - there is little to
    dole out to anyone. But as parents gain the tools to help their
    children survive and thrive (and indeed, all children do better as
    their parents' education and income levels advance), they allocate
    advantages like doctor visits to boys and firstborn girls, leaving
    subsequent daughters behind.

    To be sure, development can eventually lead to more equal treatment for
    girls: South Korea's birth ratios are now approaching normality. But
    policymakers need to realize that this type of development works
    slowly and mainly indirectly, by softening a son-centered culture. The
    solution is not to abandon development or to stop providing, say,
    microcredit to women. But these efforts should be joined by an
    awareness of the unintended consequences of development and by efforts,
    aimed at parents, to weaken the cultural preference for sons.

    The lesson here is subtle but critical: Development brings about
    immense and valuable cultural change - much of it swiftly - but it
    doesn't necessarily change all aspects of a culture at the same
    rate. (India and China have myriad laws outlawing discrimination
    against girls that are widely ignored. And how to explain the
    persistence of missing girls among Asian immigrants in America?) In
    the short and medium terms, the resulting clashes between modern
    capabilities and old prejudices can make some aspects of life worse
    before they make them better.
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