How gendered is the family?

The family is often assumed to treat all its members alike, but sociological evidence shows it does not. A widely held belief -- that a son will support his parents in old age while a daughter will 'leave' the family on marriage to join her husband's household -- leads many families to invest more resources, attention and care in male children than in female ones. This is not a minor cultural detail; it has measurable demographic consequences. Biologically, a female infant has a somewhat better chance of survival than a male infant. Yet in India, especially in the youngest age groups, the infant mortality rate among female children has been found to run higher than among male children -- the reverse of what biology alone would predict. The gap can only be explained by unequal social treatment: differences in nutrition, medical attention and general care given to girl children compared to boy children in the crucial early years of life.

This pattern is visible at a larger scale in India's sex ratio -- the number of females per thousand males -- which has been tracked over more than a century, from 1901 to 2011, and which has fluctuated and, in the child age-group especially, declined sharply in recent decades, a trend closely tied to the same preference for sons discussed here (examined further in the discussion of marriage and its link to female foeticide). …