Living Opportunity of Girls—A Revisit to Prenatal/Postnatal Gender Disparities in China

Jianlin Niu, University of Western Ontario
Yaqiang Qi, University of California, Los Angeles

Previous research has paid attention to the tradition of son preference in China and its influences on girls’ living chance, particularly after the adoption of stringent birth control policy since the late 1970s. However, most of those studies make conclusions based on small samples from some selected areas, and they focus exclusively on a few specific aspects of gender differential. In this paper, we use the data from China’s National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Survey in 2001 to examine the prenatal and postnatal gender differentials in Chinese families. Multilevel models, either of logit or of survival analysis, are constructed to analyze the gender differentials in prenatal nutrition supplement, place of delivery, duration of breastfeeding, and current living status. Two-level framework is used for all the models, with the cluster effects of family and maternal characteristics on child (fetus) treatment examined in the second level.