Have a Son, Gain a Voice: Son Preference and Female Participation in Household Decision Making

The Curious Case of Son Preference and Household

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income? To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement. Given the draconian family planning policy and a common perception that there is strong son preference in rural ...

Female Migration, Cultural Context, and Son Preference in Rural China

How does female out-migration reconfigure gender values surrounding son preference in origin communities? We propose that the feminization of migration has the potential to infuse origin communities with economic and ideational changes that may challenge son preference. Rural China provides an interesting setting, both because its unprecedented labor out-migration has increasingly included wome...

Son Preference and Gender Inequality

This paper draws out some implications of son targeting fertility behaviour for gender inequality. It is demonstrated that such behaviour has two notable implications at the aggregate level: (a)larger number of siblings for girls (Sibling Effect), and (b)a higher within-family birth order for boys (Birth Order Effect). While the first tends to worsen gender inequality through monetary factors, ...

Son preference, female demographic deficit and Singapore’s fertility transition

Fertility and son preference in Korea.

In Korea, total fertility declined from 6.0 in 1960 to 1.6 in 1990, in spite of a strong preference for male offspring. This paper addresses the notion that son preference hinders fertility decline, and examines the effects of patriarchal relations and modernization on fertility using the 1991 Korea National Fertility and Family Health Survey. It was found that women who have a son are less lik...