Existence and Determinants of Female Child Disadvantage: Evidence Based on Anthropometric Measures from Household Survey Data

Abstract

Given the fact that female-male ratio is less than unity as reported by various all India Census figure for various census year, this paper finds out the evidence of the existence of discrimination against female child, termed here as female child disadvantage (FCD), using an anthropometric measure of malnutrition–stunting (having less height than usual for age) following World Health Organization (WHO) criterion for malnutrition and exploring household level data collected from primary survey from some unplanned settlement of West Bengal, India. The use of such anthropometric measure of malnutrition in estimating FCD is not enough in the literature. The respondents are the mothers having at least one female and one male child of her own (whom she gave birth) within the age interval 6 months and 6 years; sample size being relatively small —219— given the nature of the sample. The analysis using the anthropometric measure reveals the existence of FCD for more than 60% of households. At second stage logit regression is resorted to find out the effect of parental education on FCD along with some other socio-economic variables like working status of the mother, religion, caste, income of the family and the existence of custom of dowry. The education level of both mother and father are found to have significant favorable effect and the existence of custom of dowry is found to have significant negative effect in reducing FCD; thus the enhancement of the opportunity to make the household more educated and pursuing stringent steps against dowry system will be helpful in alleviating FCD.