Gender discrimination in China revisited: a perspective from family welfare

Abstract

The strong son preference tradition in China has been weakened by the rapid development in the cultural, economic, political, and social environment, which leads to a rather ambiguous picture regarding the situation of women and girls. This article revisits this issue by comparing two approaches inspired from Engel’s method to identify equivalence scales, and directly measures and tests gender bias using household expenditure and food consumption data. Using both parametric and semiparametric estimates, we find that households need a higher compensation for the arrival of a boy than the arrival of a girl, implying that gender inequality still exists in China, particularly in rural China. We find no evidence that education reduces gender inequality in China, and the results are quite robust to using different methods. Our study indicates that gender inequality does not only extend to sex-selective abortions but still affects living children. To reduce this inequality, more attention and efforts are needed to reduce son preference. More generally, the method developed in this study can also be used to proxy welfare changes in household.