First Birth Sex Selection in Delhi, India: The Role of Progressive Gender Attitudes

This paper uses a latent factor model to create an index to measure how progressive (liberal, non-patriarchal) women's attitudes towards gender are in India. It then assesses the e ect of progressivity on the sex of the rst child and on the duration from marriage to rst birth in Delhi. In contrast to what previous literature have found by pooling data for the whole of India, Delhi has an unnaturally male biased sex ratio already for rst order births. This may be due to selective abortions and post-natal neglect of daughters. In this paper, more progressive women are those who decide on their own healthcare, are free to visit the health facility on their own, do not justify wife beating, and think that it is justi ed to refuse sex to husbands under certain circumstances. The paper nds that: (i) a one-standard deviation increase in the progressivity index increases the likelihood of a female rstborn by 5.8 percentage points compared to women who have not yet given birth; (ii) more progressive women do not experience longer rst birth intervals which, consistent with the rst result, may indicate that they are less inclined to sex-select their rst child. These results imply that women should be taught about their human rights and gender equality. More generally, regional governments should introduce interventions aimed at subsidizing and empowering women.