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Communitylevel cor re la tion of mea sured son bias and sex ratios at birth CommunityLevel Sex Ratio
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Sex ratios at birth favoring boys are being documented in a growing number of countries, a pattern indicating that families selectively abort females. Son bias also explains why, in many countries, girls have more siblings and are born at relatively earlier parities compared with their brothers. In this study, we develop novel methods for measuring...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... ratios at the com mu nity level can not be affected by sonbiased fer til ity stop ping behav ior at the house hold level and there fore reflect the prev a lence of sex-selec tive abor tions. Table 1 shows that both our implicit as well as our explicit mea sures of son bias pre dict com mu nitylevel sex ratios constructed from cen sus data. The cor re la tion coef fi cients are sig nifi cant at stan dard sig nifi cance lev els and have the expected sign. ...Similar publications
Objectives
This study aimed to assess the influences of stigma and HIV status on reproductive intention among heterosexual couples living with HIV in China.
Methods
A cross-sectional study was conducted in Kunming, China among 315 HIV-positive individuals and their spouses (n = 315 couples). An interview questionnaire was used to collect data on i...
Citations
... In 2011, we began what would turn out to be eight years of fieldwork on female genital cutting in Sudan (Efferson & Vogt, 2018;Efferson et al., 2015;Vogt et al., 2016Vogt et al., , 2017 and sex-selective abortion in Armenia (Schief et al., 2021(Schief et al., , 2024. For both projects, we worked closely with a diverse array of governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and inter-governmental organizations. ...
... Armenia, in contrast, did not have a long history of programming to reduce or eliminate the preferential abortion of female foetuses. In fact, Armenians only started relying on sex-selective abortions in the early 1990s (Schief et al., 2021(Schief et al., , 2024. Nonetheless, the pioneering research of Duthé et al. (2012), Guilmoto and Duthé (2013), and Guilmoto (2013) showed that prenatal sex selection in Armenia had been producing increasingly distorted sex ratios at birth since the collapse of the Soviet Union. ...
... The pictures are of a specific set of parents who have daughters but no sons. All nuisance variables were counterbalanced across participants (Schief et al., 2021). For example, roughly half of the participants completed a version of an implicit association test in which the parents shown in Figure 4 had daughters but no sons. . ...
... Third, parents must possess both the means and willingness to undertake sex selection. In particular, prenatal sex selection, which is the primary issue in the Caucasus, requires access to obstetric sonography and some acceptance of abortion as a method of family planning (Schief et al., 2021). ...
... Aside from general questions in gene-culture coevolutionary theory, our paper also contributes to the literature on son preference in the Caucasus (Duthé et al., 2012;Guilmoto, 2013;Meslé et al., 2007;Michael et al., 2013;Schief et al., 2021). Previous research has documented distorted sex ratios, discussed the role of sex-selective abortions, and measured son preferences using questionnaire items or implicit association tests. ...
... Importantly, our focus is on the kind of son bias that causes extreme distortions of the sex ratio, the kinds of distortion that can only stem from active sex selection on the part of the parents. For example, as we document in a previous paper (Schief et al., 2021), conditional on the first two children being girls, the sex ratio among third-born children in Armenia is a staggering 330 boys for every 100 girls. In stark contrast, conditional on the first two children being boys, the sex ratio among third-born children does not exceed the natural level of 105 boys for every 100 girls. ...
A basic hypothesis is that cultural evolutionary processes sustain differences between groups, these differences have evolutionary relevance, and they would not otherwise occur in a system without cultural transmission. The empirical challenge is that groups vary for many reasons, and isolating the causal effects of culture often requires appropriate data and a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. We address this challenge with historical data from the final Soviet census of 1989, and our analysis is an example of the epidemiological approach to identifying cultural variation. We find that the fertility decisions of Armenian, Georgian, and Azeri parents living in Soviet-era Russia were significantly more son-biased than those of other ethnic groups in Russia. This bias for sons took the form of differential stopping rules; families with sons stopped having chil- dren sooner than families without sons. This finding suggests that the increase in sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus, which began in the 1990s, reflects a cul- tural preference for sons that predates the end of the Soviet Union. This result also supports one of the key hypotheses of gene-culture coevolution, namely that cultural evolutionary processes can support group-level differences in selection pressures that would not otherwise occur in a system without culture.
... It is an extremely influential model of how social planners can recruit cultural evolutionary processes to promote behaviour change. The idea has appeared, in one form or another, across a range of policy-relevant domains [1] related to gender-based violence [16,[21][22][23][24][25][26] and other forms of gender bias [27][28][29], natural resource use [30], health [31,32], species conservation [33] and climate change [34][35][36][37][38]. ...
Applied cultural evolution includes any effort to mobilize social learning and cultural evolution to promote behaviour change. Social tipping is one version of this idea based on conformity and coordination. Conformity and coordination can reinforce a harmful social norm, but they can also accelerate change from a harmful norm to a beneficial alternative. Perhaps unfortunately, the link between the size of an intervention and social tipping is complex in heterogeneous populations. A small intervention targeted at one segment of society can induce tipping better than a large intervention targeted at a different segment. We develop and examine two models showing that the link between social tipping and social welfare is also complex in heterogeneous populations. An intervention strategy that creates persistent miscoordination, exactly the opposite of tipping, can lead to higher social welfare than another strategy that leads to tipping. We show that the potential benefits of miscoordination often hinge specifically on the preferences of people most resistant to behaviour change. Altogether, ordinary forms of heterogeneity complicate applied cultural evolution considerably. Heterogeneity weakens both the link between the size of a social planner’s intervention and behaviour change and the link between behaviour change and the well-being of society.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.
... The prevalence of gender bias towards sons due to preferences as well as differences in the economic returns to sons and daughters in developing countries, especially in South and East Asia, is well known among scholars, and its impact on children's well-being has been widely documented in the literature (for example, see Das Gupta et al., 2003;Jayachandran & Pande, 2017;Purewal, 2020;Rose, 2018;Rossi & Rouanet, 2015;Schief et al., 2021;Sen, 1990Sen, , 1992Sen, , 2001Sivak & Smirnov, 2019). Does this son preference also exist in a developed country such as the United States? 1 Although quite a few scholars have investigated this research question (for a review, see Rose, 2018), they have not reached a broad consensus on the existence of son preference in the U.S., and from the perspective that the more gender equality a society has, the less likely child gender preference exists (Pollard & Morgan, 2002), son preference should be much weaker, if there is any, in the U.S. than in most developing countries. ...
Using data drawn from 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines the existence of son preference among fathers in the U.S. by estimating the effect of child gender on the fathers’ subjective well-being. A wide range of subjective well-being measures, including happiness, pain, sadness, stress, tiredness, and meaningfulness, is analyzed, and fixed-effects models are adopted to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. The results from the full sample show that fathers feel less sad and tired when interacting with both sons and daughters versus with daughters only. In families with only one child, fathers report no difference in subjective well-being when spending time with a son versus with a daughter. By further stratifying this sample of fathers by child’s age of three, we continue to find no difference in paternal subjective well-being between being with a son and with a daughter when the child is younger than three. However, when the child is three or older, we find that fathers feel less stressed and more meaningful being with a son versus with a daughter. The results from Asian fathers in the U.S., in contrast, show a tremendous reduction in stress in activities with sons only than with daughters only. These results indicate no evidence of son preference in the general U.S. population. If there is any, it only exists among Asian fathers in the U.S.
... When conformity or coordination supports a status quo norm inconsistent with policy objectives, policymakers can promote an alternative norm by incentivizing their preferred behaviour in a subset of the population only 22,29 . Alternative norms might include the abandonment of female genital cutting 34 , giving up smoking 35 , driving electric cars 7 , not aborting fetuses because they are female 36 and eating chicken instead of pangolin 13 . Interventions can take many forms, ranging from taxes and subsidies 5 to entertaining narratives with educational messaging [37][38][39] . ...
Social tipping can accelerate behaviour change consistent with policy objectives in diverse domains from social justice to climate change. Hypothetically, however, group identities might undermine tipping in ways that policymakers do not anticipate. To examine this, we implemented an experiment around the 2020 US federal elections. The participants faced consistent incentives to coordinate their choices. Once the participants had established a coordination norm, an intervention created pressure to tip to a new norm. Our control treatment used neutral labels for choices. Our identity treatment used partisan political images. This simple pay-off-irrelevant relabelling generated extreme differences. The control groups developed norms slowly before intervention but transitioned to new norms rapidly after intervention. The identity groups developed norms rapidly before intervention but persisted in a state of costly disagreement after intervention. Tipping was powerful but unreliable. It supported striking cultural changes when choice and identity were unlinked, but even a trivial link destroyed tipping entirely.
The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy. A nascent literature tackles social tipping interventions—STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. This article takes stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by first reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics; then, it assesses the initial evidence on the effectiveness of STI, in light of the outcomes of laboratory and online experiments that were designed to study coordination on an emergent alternative to the initial status quo. Lastly, the article identifies potential conceptual limitations and proposes fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation.
Introduction:
The human Sex Ratio at Birth is the parameter which reflects the relationship between males and females at birth. It is not 50:50, but approximately 0.515 in favour of males. There are many factors that can influence Sex Ratio at Birth and its variations are not easily demonstrable.
Evidence acquisition:
Our aim has been to investigate the environmental and human agents capable of causing variations in the Sex Ratio at Birth by providing a narrative review of the scientific literature.
Evidence synthesis:
Studies demonstrated that male and female embryos/foetuses response to stress in different way and the male ones show less resistance. This phenomenon seems to persist for approximately six months after a stressful event, suggesting a purpose of reproductive regulation and protection of the perpetuation of the species. Although the relationship of dependence with parenting decisions, thanks to prenatal diagnosis and assisted fertility techniques is easily understood, it is more complex to correlate its variations with environmental pressures that act through secondary mechanisms. The Covid-19 pandemic, natural catastrophes, terroristic attacks, economic crises are some of the difficulties encountered in recent times.
Conclusions:
The impact of all the factors reported is not explained only with a possible a priori determination of sex at conception, but also with secondary effects in the pregnancy outcomes. Thus, the determination of sex appears to be a complex and multifactorial mechanism, besides a matter of genetics. The pandemic and climate changes are the present important opportunities of research for possibly reaching more certain answers.
We propose a novel son preference measure that relates the preference to a specific child. We find child-specific son preference to be more common among later born children and in families with fewer sons. Using the novel measure and an interaction instrumental variables approach, we estimate a penalty in early mental functions for unwanted girls of 0.7 standard deviations. This penalty appears to be partially driven by discrimination against girls and partially by pampering of boys. Children’s health and parental inputs do not mediate the effect from son preference to mental development. Our findings highlight the relevance of parents’ attitudes for a nurturing home environment and healthy brain development.
