Preference for Sons and Daughters in Developing Countries: When Does (Dis)agreement Between Spouses Come into Play?

The paper explores the relative roles of men’s and women’s sex composition preferences for women’s desire to stop childbearing in developing countries. The analysis covers 45 countries, using Demographic and Health Survey couples datasets from the years 2010 to 2021. Probabilities of women’s desire to stop childbearing are considered when the sex composition of children matches the ideals of both the woman and her partner, of the woman or her partner only, and of neither of them. Models with country fixed effects are estimated for two pooled samples, one including couples from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where sex composition of children is rarely linked to fertility, and the other one including couples from all other regions. The analysis has shown that in case men and women disagreed on whether current sex composition of children matched their ideals, women’s unmatched preferences were more strongly related to their desires to have one more child, both in and outside SSA. In the non-SSA countries, agreement of both spouses in their dissatisfaction with sex composition of children additionally raised the probability of women’s desire for the next child. However, men’s unmatched fertility preferences played no role in women’s fertility desires in SSA. Both the priority of women’s sex composition ideal for children and the importance of agreement between spouses are not expected in the context of family patriarchy. The results suggest that developing countries are not in a sharp contrast on roles of men and women in taking fertility decisions, at least in what concerns sex composition of children.