Disparities in Gender Preference and Fertility: Southeast Asia and Latin America in a Comparative Perspective

A preference for sons and a sex selection against females are widespread in vast regions of the world, including a great number of Asian and East European countries. However, while a robust son bias has been widely studied in several countries of these regions, much less attention has been given to other regions, such as Latin America. The aim of this paper is to compare gender preferences in twelve selected countries of Southeast Asia and Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century by calculating to what extent parents adapt their fertility behaviors to ensure the birth of a preferred sex. Using census data from Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International (IPUMS-I), derived mostly from the 2010 round, we compute parity progression ratios with the Kaplan–Meier estimator and estimate Cox regressions to include control variables. The results focus on the probability of having a third child and show that a mixed composition of children (one boy and one girl) is the most widespread preference, except in Vietnam, where a heavy son preference can still be observed. The least preferred outcome varies between regions and countries, but it is most often two daughters.