ArticleDemography2020
Gender Discrimination and Excess Female Under-5 Mortality in India: A New Perspective Using Mixed-Sex Twins.
Article in Demography, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mortality among Children Aged 1-59 Months in India: Evidence from a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2009-2024).Journal of epidemiology and global health · 2026Pooled it
- Gender bias in fertility choices: how son preference increases the risk of short birth intervals in India.Tropical medicine and health · 2026Article
- Temperature and sex ratios at birth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Gender-based discrimination towards cisgender women in low- and middle-income countries: a scoping review of definitions and measures used in the health literature.BMJ public health · 2026Article
- Associations between widowhood status/duration, depression, and cognitive function among community-dwelling Indians age 60 years or older: Exploration of sex and residential factors.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2025Article
- Article
- Patriarchy, Fertility and Excess Female Child Mortality in India.Spatial demography · 2025Article
- Gender, climate and landowning: Sources of variability in the weather pattern change and ideal fertility relationship in Sahelian West Africa.Vienna yearbook of population research · 2024Article
- Mixed-methods study assessing the accuracy of verbal autopsy and sociocultural determinants of infant mortality in Gujarat, India.Journal of education and health promotion · 2024Article
- Do precarious female employment and political autonomy affect the under-5 mortality rate? Evidence from 166 countries.PloS one · 2022Article
- Integrating time into stigma and health research.Nature reviews psychology · 2022Review
- A Comparison of Non-verbal Maternal Care of Male and Female Infants in India and the United Kingdom: The Parent-Infant Caregiving Touch Scale in Two Cultures.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Son preference has been linked to excess female under-5 mortality in India, and considerable literature has explored whether parents invest more resources in sons relative to daughters-which we refer to as explicit discrimination-leading to girls' poorer health status and, consequently, higher mortality. However, this literature has not adequately controlled for the implicit discrimination processes that sort girls into different types of families (e.g., larger) and at earlier parities. To better address the endogeneity associated with implicit discrimination processes, we explore the association between child sex and postneonatal under-5 mortality using a sample of mixed-sex twins from four waves of the Indian National Family Health Survey. Mixed-sex twins provide a natural experiment that exogenously assigns a boy and a girl to families at the same time, thus controlling for selectivity into having an unwanted female child. We document a sizable impact of explicit discrimination on girls' excess mortality in India, particularly compared with a placebo analysis in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls have a survival advantage. We also show that explicit discrimination weakened for birth cohorts after the mid-1990s, especially in northern India, but further weakening has stalled since the mid-2000s, thus contributing to understandings of how the micro-processes underlying the female mortality disadvantage have changed over time.
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