What makes a stopping rule sexist?

Area of Science:

• Sociology
• Demography
• Behavioral Economics

Background:

• Parental decisions on family size influence child well-being.
• The sex composition of existing children can affect these decisions.
• Previous research has not fully explored how sex-linked parental choices impact child well-being and create gender disparities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To model parental decisions to have children using a stopping rule based on the number of boys and girls.
• To investigate how these sex-dependent stopping rules can introduce correlations between offspring sex and sibling number.
• To determine the conditions under which such rules lead to a correlation between sex and well-being, potentially creating a sexist outcome.

Main Methods:

• Development of a mathematical model for parental stopping rules.
• Analysis of the model to identify correlations between offspring sex, sibling number, and well-being.
• Derivation of sufficient conditions for a stopping rule to be considered sexist.

Main Results:

• Parental stopping rules, dependent on the sex of previous children, can create a correlation between an offspring's sex and their number of siblings.
• This correlation, when combined with a link between sibling number and well-being, can result in a disparity in average well-being between sexes.
• The study identifies specific conditions on stopping rules that lead to unequal average well-being based on sex.

Conclusions:

• Parental sex-selective birth decisions, even without direct discrimination within families, can lead to gender inequality in well-being.
• The study provides a theoretical framework for understanding how demographic choices can have unintended sexist consequences.
• Further research can explore empirical evidence for these sex-linked well-being disparities in different populations.