Gender, Context, and Infant Mortality in Rural China

William M. Mason, University of California, Los Angeles
William Lavely, University of Washington

Linkages between gender and mortality are everywhere to be found, but sex-biased parental behaviors such as infanticide, neglect, and abandonment make the connection unusually direct. The effects of sex preferential behavior on infant mortality are fairly well documented in the demographic literature on South Asia, but less well understood in China where the phenomenon is, if anything, more important and more dramatic. We apply multilevel survival models to clustered data from the 1990 census of China to further specify the characteristics and contexts that link gender to infant survival. We find that infant mortality is strongly patterned by parents’ strategizing about the number and sex of their children, with risks extending to boys as well as girls. Moreover, we find that excess female mortality reflects village environment or culture as well as the characteristics of individual families, mothers, and infants themselves.