Abstract
Parental bias toward children of a particular gender has been widely observed in many societies. Such bias could be due to pure gender preference or differences in earning opportunities and concern for old-age support. We conduct a high-stakes allocation task (subjects allocate the equivalent of one day’s wages between male and female school-aged students) in rural Bangladesh to examine parental attitudes toward male and female children. Parents, either jointly or individually, allocated freely or restricted endowments for the benefit of anonymous girls or boys at a nearby school. We examine whether there is any systematic bias among fathers and mothers and, if so, whether such bias differs when they make the decision individually or jointly. The results suggest (1) bias both for and against boys or girls but no systematic bias by either parent; and (2) no significant differences in individual and joint decisions.
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Notes
These issues are discussed in more detail in the next section.
Purdah is a religious and social practice among Muslims (and Hindus, especially in Indian subcontinent) that involves the seclusion of women from public observation by means of concealing clothing, including the veil.
See Munro (2018) for a survey of the recent experimental work on intrahousehold decision-making.
These two districts are typical of any Bangladesh’s 64 districts. They were chosen because the research team has been working on other projects in those districts for a number of years.
Our sample is representative of the rural households. We do not restrict the sample to only households with children at school. We include all households with school-aged children, including those families with no school-going child.
We omitted 18 households because one or both parents were absent at the time. No household refused to participate in the study. The obvious reason for not refusing to participate is that the participation fee was high relative to the participants’ opportunity cost. Also, the enumerators and the third author were local. Nonetheless, unanimous acceptance is not uncommon in other experimental studies of this type (Carlsson et al. 2012).
The average daily wage in the locality at the time of the study was roughly 150 taka for males and 100 taka for females.
Enumerators were supervised by trained research assistants with experience in conducting similar field experiments. The supervisor and all enumerators were trained by the authors and given guidelines for the study.
We conduct the allocation task and surveys in subjects’ homes because of the common concern that subjects might behave differently in an artificial experimental environment.
The envelopes were labeled with the drawings because some parents may be illiterate. Envelopes were marked with ID numbers to allow matching of allocation decisions and survey responses. None of the participants stole the money.
The third author has a strong connection in these areas and has been conducting a multiyear intervention in the area with the same group of enumerators.
Figure A1 in the online appendix shows the 25 choices available to subjects assigned to UI and the two choices available to subjects assigned to RI. Let us take a parent whose actual preference is at point A. The parent might hide his/her preference by choosing an equal split at point C, which moves him/her from U1 to U3. Limiting the choice set to just two options forces the parent to move to U4 (point D) if he/she wants to hide the real preference. Instead, the other option (point B) is closer to real preferences. As the graph illustrates, the manipulation forces the person to move to a much lower utility level if he/she wants to hide the actual preferences. Given the restricted choice set, parents supposedly choose the option that gives them the highest utility. This restriction also forces parents to show bias even when they are not biased to any gender. However, this might be explained by extreme cases where parents need to choose investing in either a boy or a girl—for example, due to resource constraint. Nonetheless, our main objective of incorporating this restriction is to compare the average bias shown by the parents between treatments without and with restriction.
The results reported later herein are not affected by the differences in the sample sizes or characteristics across treatment groups.
We choose to be conservative in what we consider unbiased. Any deviation from an even split is defined as biased.
We also include a number of control variables in our regression to examine whether household composition can affect our main results. Our results remain the same when we add controls, such as whether first child is girl, ratio of son to daughter, whether the family has only one son, or whether the family has only one daughter.
We also use logit and probit regressions for binary outcomes, and a 0–1 inflated beta distribution for when the outcome is a proportion. The results are similar and are available upon request.
We check whether parental allocation in the task is correlated with the gender of the firstborn child. The correlation coefficient is not significant in any of the treatments.
Furthermore, Wilcoxon rank sum tests cannot reject the null hypothesis that the allocations to boys by boy-biased fathers, mothers, and couples are drawn from the same populations as the allocations to girls by girl-biased fathers, mothers, and couples (p value > .10 in both cases, two-tailed test).
We also find that the combined father and mother allocations from UI do not differ significantly from the couple distribution from UJ.
A number of related questions in the survey relate to who makes the following decisions: (1) overall household matters, (2) education, (3) health care, (4) shopping, and (5) time allocation (going outside the home or work). For overall household matters, fathers’ and mothers’ answers differ in only a few households; for other specific decisions, though, fathers’ and mothers’ answers differ significantly. We focus here on the decisions related to children’s education, given that the parents in the task are deciding on allocating money that goes to school children.
Households with “different responses” refer to those in which husband and wife report differently in the survey about the decision-making within households.
This is consistent with Carlsson et al.’s (2012) finding from an experiment on intertemporal choice that both parents influence the joint decision, with the father exerting a stronger influence.
We also run regressions including all parents in the unrestricted treatment groups rather than only biased parents. The results remain robust and are available upon request.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Lisa Cameron, Tim Cason, Gaurav Datt, Catherine Eckel, Lata Gangadharan, Glenn Harrison, John List, Yasuyuki Sawada, Russell Smyth, and Steven Stillman. We also thank the participants at the Australian Development Economics Workshop in Canberra, the Econometric Society Australasian Meeting in Sydney, the Asia Pacific Meeting of the Economic Science Association in Auckland, Monash University seminars, and Economic Research Group in Dhaka for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
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Begum, L., Grossman, P.J. & Islam, A. Gender Bias in Parental Attitude: An Experimental Approach. Demography 55, 1641–1662 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0699-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0699-y