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.