Sex Ratios and Family Life in China

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A longstanding cultural preference for sons over daughters and the largely successful imposition of a one-child fertility policy have converged with more proximate factors, particularly the widespread availability of sex-selective abortion technology, to create an astounding shortage of girls in China over recent decades. As these cohorts age, China will soon experience a dramatic overabundance of adult males relative to adult females. The potential consequences of these imbalanced sex ratios are thought by many observers to be profound and far-reaching. We propose to examine the impact of imbalanced adult sex ratios on four dimensions of family life in China: family formation behavior (including age at marriage, likelihood of divorce, and assortative mating by age, education, and social background); women's socioeconomic status (including their educational and occupational attainment and labor force participation); sexual behavior (including age at first sexual intercourse and engagement in premarital and extramarital intercourse); and internal family dynamics (including the division of household labor, marital quality and commitment, and domestic violence). Our conceptual framework is grounded in influential but still controversial theories linking skewed sex ratios to family-related demographic behavior and to women's and men's familial and economic roles and statuses. We plan to test hypotheses drawn from these and other theoretical perspectives using data from the recent Chinese Health and Family Life Survey (CHFLS), a large, nationally-representative survey of Chinese adults, to which we will append information from Chinese censuses describing the relative numbers of women and men in their local residential community. By capitalizing on the substantial geographic variation in adult sex ratios across China, and by applying statistical techniques appropriate for the analysis of multilevel data structures, the proposed analysis holds promise for substantially enhancing our understanding of how China's increasing overabundance of males relative to females will affect multiple dimensions of family life. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Growing imbalances in China's sex ratio have the potential to alter substantially multiple dimensions of family life and, through this, the physical and mental health of the world's most populous nation. Therefore, learning more about the family-related impacts of China's male surplus and female deficit is an important scientific objective.