Religion, Literacy, and the Female-to-Male Ratio in India

This paper proposes a new explanation for religious differences in fertility in India by incorporating the issue of gender bias into the debate. It reports the results from an econometric investigation of the factors influencing the sex ratio at birth and among currently living children, by religion and by caste, for a sample of over 10,000 women in India. The investigation paid particular attention to religion and caste by subdividing the sample into Hindu, Muslim and Dalit women who had all terminated their fertility. It enquired whether the effect of different variables on the sex ratio varied according to the religion and caste of the women. The econometric analysis found that a husband being literate served to raise the sex ratio both at birth and of currently living children but that the effect of husbands' literacy was stronger for Muslims and Dalits than it was for Hindus. In other words, while the illiteracy of husbands exacerbated 'son preference' (and its obverse, 'daughter aversion') the preference for sons (and the aversion to daughters) exercised a stronger hold on Hindu families than it did on Muslim and Dalit families. * The authors are affiliated to, respectively: School of Economics and Politics, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland ([email protected]); Faculty of Economics and St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, England ([email protected]). This paper was revised while Iyer was visiting the Department of Economics at Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and she would like to thank both these institutions for their support. We are grateful to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi for providing us with data from the 1993-94 Human Development Survey and to Siddiq Osmani for helpful discussions on the subject.