Gender Preferences for Children in an Era of Low Fertility

Letizia Mencarini, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy
Thaís García-Pereiro, University of Bari
Raffaella Patimo, Università degli Studi di Bari A. Moro
Maria Letizia Tanturri, University of Padova
Samuel Plach, Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi

Literature evidences that fertility intentions can be driven not only by the desiderated number of children, but rather by gender preferences. If previous studies traditionally focus on preference for son fueling progress to the third child, more recently the attention has been attracted by a new unexpected preference for daughter and on the crucial passage to the second child. This paper gets an insight on gender preferences in a plurality of low fertility contexts to investigate whether such preference is in act toward son or daughter, how it varies by gender or socioeconomic individual background, by the composition of actual offspring, by country of residence, but also by the desired characteristics of the ideal child. Answers to the question: “If you could have only one child, would you prefer it to be a son or a daughter?” – collected in eight low-fertility countries by a web-survey in 2021- are analyzed. Results confirm in some countries a marked son preference, in others a daughter one, while in a few it does not matter at all. Results from multinomial logit models evidence that the individual-level drivers of gender preference vary across countries, genders and sex of the first child.

Keywords: Fertility, Gender Dynamics

See extended abstract.