Gender bias among children in India in their diet and immunisation against disease

Abstract

This paper conducts an econometric analysis of data for a sample of over 4000 children in India, between the ages of 1-2 years of age, with a view to studying two aspects of the neglect of children: their likelihood of being immunised against disease and their likelihood of receiving a nutritious diet. The starting hypothesis, consistent with an universal interest in gender issues, was that girls were more likely to be neglected than boys. The analysis confirmed this hypothesis. In respect of vaccinations, the likelihood of girls being fully vaccinated, after controlling for other variables, was five percentage points lower than that for boys. In respect of receiving a nutritious diet, the treatment of girls depended very much on whether or not their mothers were literate: there was no gender discrimination between children of literate mothers; on the other hand, when the mother was illiterate, girls were five percentage points less likely to be well-fed relative to their brothers and the presence of a literate father did little to dent this gender gap. But the analysis also pointed to a broader conclusion which was that all children in India suffered from sharper, but less publicised, forms of disadvantage than that engendered solely by gender. These were the consequences which stemmed from children being born to illiterate mothers and being brought up in the more impoverished parts of India. (228 words)

The Effect of Self Help Groups on Access to Maternal Health Services: Evidence from Rural India

“…Even when treatment is sought, significantly smaller sums of money are spent on treatment of women than on men [2]. Gender discrimination exists in child feeding, health care, and nutrition status in India [3][4][5][6][7][8][9], and other South Asian countries [10,11].…”

Knowledge towards childhood immunization among mothers & reasons for incomplete immunization

“…Gender discrimination in immunization coverage has been shown to exist in all states of India (Pande, Yazbeck, 2003;Borooah, 2004). These studies depicted that female children are subjected to gender discrimination and are not getting proper attention regarding immunization.…”

A comparative study of the nutritional, education and immunisation profile of children visiting tertiary care centre-is there a gender preference or no?

“…This was similar to various studies, though most of the studies enrolled children less than 5 years which was not included in our study and among various social factors like educational status of parents, socioeconomic status, gender was also the most important cause for inequity in immunisation status. [14][15][16][17] All the children were going to school, among males 87% were from private school and 13% from government school, among females 89 % were from private school and 11% from government school, there was no significant difference based on type of school, also there were no school drop outs. A Study showed that percentage of school enrolment and school attendance was less among girls as compared to boys and there were many school dropouts.…”