Does Maternal Early Marriage Influence Gender Bias in Child Well-Being?

Early-marrying women are shown to exhibit a greater preference for sons. In this study, we examine whether, and to what extent, the preferential treatment of boys in early childhood is associated with the practice of early female marriage in Pakistan. Analyzing pooled data on 167,151 children born to 45,260 women between 1952 and 2018, we employ fixed-effects and instrumental-variable strategies to provide evidence of a lack of gender-specific differences in healthcare and development outcomes between children below age five born to early- and late-marrying women. We consider a broad set of outcomes related to (1) perinatal care (home delivery, child weight at birth, and miscarriage), (2) child healthcare (postnatal checkups, completion of vaccination courses, vitamin A intake, and treatment of cough or diarrhea), (3) nutrition (duration of breastfeeding, consumption of meat and fish, and consumption of fruits), and (4) early childhood development (stunting, underweight, wasting, and infant and child mortality). Our findings indicate that the association between maternal age at marriage and child outcomes is not gender-specific. Preferential treatment of sons-whether in terms of perinatal or postnatal care, access to nutritious food, or healthcare-does not depend on the mother's age at marriage. This effect holds regardless of the boy's birth order or family sex composition, nor does it vary with the mother's birth cohort, education, location, or household wealth status. Demographic transition also appears to play no role. Similarly, the father's age at marriage has little impact. However, we find some evidence that boys born to early-marrying women are more likely to survive past their fifth birthday compared to girls. This effect is particularly pronounced for children of women who married before age 16 and those whose husbands married before age 18. We conduct extensive sensitivity analyses and robustness checks to address potential concerns related to gender-specific recall bias, self-selection, and sex-selective abortion. We also obtain estimates using an alternative definition of early marriage, as well as different estimators, datasets, and estimation techniques, all of which confirm the robustness of our baseline findings. These findings underscore the persistence of patriarchal social norms that continue to reward women with greater agency for bearing sons.