Skewed Sex Ratios in India: “Physician, Heal Thyself”

Sex selection, a gender discrimination of the worst kind, is highly prevalent across all strata of Indian society. Physicians have a crucial role in this practice and implementation of the Indian Government’s Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act in 1996 to prevent the misuse of ultrasound techniques for the purpose of prenatal sex determination. Little is known about family preferences, let alone preferences among families of physicians. We investigated the sex ratios in 946 nuclear families with 1,624 children, for which either one or both parents were physicians. The overall child sex ratio was more skewed than the national average of 914. The conditional sex ratios decreased with increasing number of previous female births, and a previous birth of a daughter in the family was associated with a 38 % reduced likelihood of a subsequent female birth. The heavily skewed sex ratios in the families of physicians are indicative of a deeply rooted social malady that could pose a critical challenge in correcting the sex ratios in India.     

Resource Access and Status Versus Values and Agency: Is There a Correspondence?

This paper attempts to explore the correspondence (or lack of it) between women’s access to resources and their social status on one hand and between women’s social status and their values and agency on the other. This would necessarily involve an assessment of the role of women’s access to resources towards their attitudinal transformation and ability to exercise agency. However, this also entails an understanding of the circumstances including norms and institutions amidst which women exercise choices. While gender research today boasts of rich empirical contributions, the implication of women’s improved resource access on intra-family-gendered relation as well as on women’s own preferences and agency roles still deserves a comprehensive inquiry. This paper attempts to conduct such an exercise in Indian context, by utilizing existing demographic health survey and other data. It observes that despite women’s control over resources and access to education, gendered role as well as attitudes and preferences of men and of women themselves, remain intact. While this observation underlines the impinging role of social context, alongside it also reflects the inefficacy of using conventional indicators to measure women’s autonomy and gender equality.