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Patrilocality and Child Sex Ratios in India

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Abstract

In multi-level and multi-layered foundations of gendered approaches for understanding the kinship system, family-building behavior, son preference, and male-skewed child sex ratios in India; patriarchy and patrilineality have received greater attention than patrilocality. To fill this gap, we construct a measure of patrilocality and hypothesize that households practice sex selection and daughter discrimination because of patrilocality norms that dictate the later life co-residence between parents and sons. Our findings reveal that the child sex ratio, sex ratio at birth, and sex ratio at last birth are negatively correlated with patrilocality rates across states and districts of India. The robustness of these findings is verified by using alternative definitions of patrilocality, examining the association between patrilocality and patrilineality, and assessing the relationship between patrilocality and child sex ratios across states and by urbanization levels. We conclude that, in the absence of strong social security measures and a lack of preference for old-age homes, amidst the accepted practice of patrilocality coupled with increasingly lower fertility norms, the dependency on sons will continue, leading to the continuation of sex selection in India.

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Data Availability

The data used in this study will be made available upon request from the authors.

Notes

  1. Das Gupta (1987) documented this observation in highly well-to-do landowners of Punjab who were not far behind landless people in terms of female mortality and selective discrimination; their women preferring half a daughter vis-à-vis little less than two sons.

  2. Female autonomy as described by Dyson and Moore (1983) is the control over one’s own private space and ability— mental, social, and practical—to influence it through the needed information.

  3. These are different from the natural factors highlighted by Miller (1989) that keep the sex-ratios biologically skewed at two stages- (1) Sex-ratios tend to be high at birth, about 105, but this skewness fades away in a year due to rather high natural mortality rates of a male child compared to a female child in first year of birth, (2) Females have comparatively high mortality at their reproductive ages due to pregnancy and childbirth related complexities.

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Acknowledgements

The authors immensely benefited from extensive comments and suggestions on the first draft by Professor Monica Das Gupta, University of Maryland, Professor Christopher Guilmoto, Ined-IRD, Mary E. John, CWDS, New Delhi and Colleagues at the UWA Economics Unit. We also thank Professor P.M. Kulkarni, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Professor K.S. James, IIPS for helpful discussions on the topic. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers, as well as Kara Joyner, the Editor-in-Chief of Population Research and Policy Review, for their excellent comments and suggestions, which significantly improved the manuscript. The authors are solely responsible for any remaining errors.

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Goli, S., Arora, S., Jain, N. et al. Patrilocality and Child Sex Ratios in India. Popul Res Policy Rev 43, 54 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-024-09897-0

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