Health Consequences of Patriarchal Kinship System for the Elderly: Evidence from India

The patriarchal kinship system in India considers sons as harbingers of prosperity and daughters as liabilities who require significant outlay of resources through their lifetimes. This social system assigns a higher value to sons and perpetuates discrimination in various forms. In this paper, instead of focusing on inferior outcomes for daughters, we provide empirical evidence of disproportionate penalties placed on long-term health outcomes of their parents. Using nationally representative data on health expenditure and outcomes for 2014, we find that a higher number of daughters are associated with increased probabilities of chronic ailment and self-reported poor health among the elderly. The effects are significantly weaker for scheduled tribes, a social group with relatively egalitarian gender norms. Also, these effects are stronger for higher quintiles of standardised number of daughters. Our findings remain robust to a variety of internal validity tests. In particular, we use a recent method that accounts for omitted variable bias to arrive at consistent estimates of bias adjusted treatment effects. Improved access to education and employment for daughters, adequate social protection and milestone-based conditional cash transfers are some ways to ameliorate this bias.