IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v19y2013i1p1-28.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Women's Empowerment and Gender Bias in the Birth and Survival of Girls in Urban India

Author

Listed:
  • Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee

Abstract

Despite improvements in women's work opportunities and educational achievements, women's survival disadvantage is a demographic reality of urban India. A temporal and cross-sectional analysis of the data from the 1991 and 2001 census of India, while reaffirming the positive association between women's employment and the birth and survival of more girls, fails to reconfirm the oft-emphasized positive connection between women's education and increased survival of girls. Relatively high levels of women's education, by being indicative of household socioeconomic status, may be associated with increased ability to discriminate against girls through prenatal sex selection, especially in the presence of cultural biases resulting in low women's rates of participation in paid work, persistence of dowry payments, and lack of women's property rights. As the educational achievements of urban Indian women improve, gender discrimination in the birth and survival of girls may intensify as a cumulative effect of socioeconomic factors continuing to favor sons.

Suggested Citation

  • Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee, 2013. "Women's Empowerment and Gender Bias in the Birth and Survival of Girls in Urban India," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(1), pages 1-28, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:19:y:2013:i:1:p:1-28
    DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2012.752312
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2012.752312
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13545701.2012.752312?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Echávarri, Rebeca & Husillos, Javier, 2016. "The Missing Link Between Parents’ Preferences and Daughters’ Survival: The Moderator Effect of Societal Discrimination," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 372-385.
    2. Timothy Watson & Michael Corliss & Michelle Le, 2018. "Digitalisation and Women’s Workforce Participation in the Indo-Pacific," Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), Curtin Business School, vol. 21(1), pages 45-74.
    3. Rebeca Echavarri, 2022. "Neonatal discrimination and excess female mortality in childhood in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 16(1), pages 79-104, January.
    4. Sudarshan, Ratna M., 2014. "Enabling women's work," ILO Working Papers 994860303402676, International Labour Organization.
    5. repec:ilo:ilowps:486030 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Daniel Rosenblum, 2017. "Estimating the Private Economic Benefits of Sons Versus Daughters in India," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(1), pages 77-107, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:19:y:2013:i:1:p:1-28. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.