English 
Français

Comparative analysis of son preference in Indian immigrants in Spain, USA and Canada:The role of parental education, age, place of birth and endogamy.

Parminder Kaur, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Iñaki Permanyer Ugartemendia, Autonomous University of Barcelona

Son preference is a systematic bias in favor of the male child. Although scholars have widely studied son preference in India, Indian migrants posit a conundrum on how migrating from patriarchal to relatively egalitarian societies would impact the marked gender gap between boys and girls. This paper aims at investigating son preference among Indian immigrants in three countries (Spain 2011, USA 2015, and Canada 2011). For this purpose, we examine the census microdata from the IPUMS International. The resulting datasets has 4833, 3615875 and 898870 cases respectively for Spain, U.S.A and Canada. We compare the sex ratios (0 to 15 years) (from males to females) for all the three samples, across groups based on parental educational attainment and endogamy. Additionally, a logistic regression analysis is also conducted. Results show that in the case of Indian immigrants in three countries, when parents are more educated, they are more likely to have a balanced sex ratio. We conclude that there is strong son preference in the case of Indian immigrants in the Spanish sample, however, there is evidence of slight son preference in the US and the Canadian samples. Overall, our results demonstrate that Indian immigrants are still carrying their gender preferences.

Keywords: Inequality, Gender, Age structure, Census data

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P17.