Introduction

The phenomenon of “missing women” first brought into prominence by Amartya Sen in the 1990s has only seen greater concretization in the last few decades with steep deterioration in sex ratios at birth being recorded in India, across class, caste and regional divides (Sen 1990; Agnihotri 2000). In its most recent World Population Report released in June 2020, the United Nations Population Fund reported that one in three girls missing globally due to sex selection is from India, adding up to a total of 46 million (UNFPA 2020).

Global bodies such as the UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women classify “gender-biased sex selection” (henceforth GBSS) as a “harmful practice” alongside other practices such as FGM (female genital mutilation) and child marriage that impinge on girls, reducing their rights, freedom and agency to participate fully in development and society. Some scholars have even argued that increasing masculinization of Indian and Chinese societies would pose a security threat to the world as a whole (Hudson and den Boer 2004).

The prenatal deselection of girls is a new form of gender discrimination that Sen (2001) calls “natality inequality”; indeed, the unexpected rise of this particular form of gender injustice among many pre-existing ones appears contradictory at a time when the country is progressing economically, and some development indicators for women and girls, such as life expectancy, infant mortality and education gender gaps, are improving substantially.

In this article, we argue that a combination of the global impulses favouring population control and promotion of fertility decline as a goal, along with the policies adopted by the Indian state to combat the issue of adverse sex ratios, has created ideological discourses that continue to implicitly devalue daughters. Combined with easy access to technological innovations, desires for social mobility and the role of the family as a site of operationalizing state politics and ideology, parental choices to “fashion” desirable family compositions in the absence of guilt associated with older practices such as female infanticide have together led to a gendered “biopolitics of reproduction” that continues to see daughters as dispensable bodies while marking sons as more valuable. Together, the state, civil society, market and technological advancements have contributed to a legitimizing discourse (Arora 1996) where gender-biased sex selection as a practice is widespread enough to result in a gendered biopolitics with very specific demographic outcomes for girls in the country.Footnote 1 Gender-biased sex selection by various means (infanticide, early mortality of girls through neglect, abortion after sex determination through ultrasound and other technologies, pre-conception sex selection) and its outcome in the form of skewed child sex ratios is, however, not spread uniformly through the country. Both historically and in their contemporary prevalence, male-biased sex ratios are more common in the northern and western regions of the country. While these have been historical regions of female discrimination, the practice of daughter elimination has spread to newer regions and across social groups and classes. In India, urban areas have more skewed child sex ratios, an outcome of the faster adoption of smaller family sizes and more extensive use of new technologies to ensure the birth of sons (Kaur 2020; Guo et al. 2016; UNFPA 2014).

The article makes its arguments through reframing existing social science understanding of GBSS within the perspective of a gendered biopolitics of reproduction. It introduces the concept of biosocial strategies of the household that helps us understand both biological and social reproduction achieved through fertility shaping and sex-selective abortion in the context of neoliberal mobility strategies. The discussion on perceptible shifts in parental attitudes is based on an extensive review of post-1990s social science literature enquiring into gender discrimination.

Governing Population: the Indian Trajectory

Motivated by global impulses and Malthusian theories which framed overpopulation as a crucial inhibitor of “development”, India’s focus on controlling fertility in order to tackle poverty and underdevelopment meant that population control was at the forefront of state planning soon after its very inception (Rao 2004; Eklund and Purewal 2017; Purewal and Eklund 2018). Starting in 1952, India became the first country in the world to introduce state-led family planning initiatives, based on a combination of incentives and deterrence-based schemes. It also became the first developing country in the world to legalize abortion in 1970 (Menon 1995). Although this legislation was passed in the purported interests of women, scholars like Menon argue that the use of abortion as a tool for controlling family sizes was an understood goal of the policy.

The 1970s also saw the proclamation of the Emergency in India, made (in)famous by the compulsory sterilization programme with targets and “quotas” that government officials had to fulfil in a bid to fix the “population problem” (Rao 2004; Chatterjee and Riley 2001; Wilson 2018). By the1980s however, wide-ranging discrepancies in budgets allocated for preventive measures (such as contraception) compared to female sterilization showed the commitment of the Indian state towards finding more long-term, irreversible “solutions” to the overpopulation issue, which explicitly focused on the targeting of the female body as the site of intervention. Along with the internalization of “family planning” messages that advertised the small family (hum do, hamare do—us two, our two) as being synonymous with modernity, family prosperity and loyal citizenship, these efforts ultimately resulted in a reduction of average number of children born per women in India from 5.2 to 2.2 in a span of four decades (Purewal 2018, 29; Chatterjee and Riley 2001; Säävälä 2010). The slow but sure decline in infant and child mortality, increasing costs of raising children and reduced fertility as a mobility strategy played their part in the acceptance of state discourses. As Chatterjee and Riley (2001, 831) remark, “Reproductive control, or the “voluntary (responsible) parenthood” prescribed as essential for global, national, and individual progress, is (was) the key issue”.

Population control strategies however remained explicitly gendered with class-based targeting which shaped discourses of the “poor woman” as the primary cause of underdevelopment in India and created a paternalistic relationship between the state and a specific subsection of its population where exercising disciplinary control over women’s reproductive choices was legitimized for the “greater good” of the nation state (Chatterjee and Riley 2001). Thus, the governing of population as species was not uniform, and the state created a system of “stratified reproduction” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995) by aiming its policies at those who were seen as recalcitrant but were more vulnerable, reflecting the intersectionalities of class and gender in the biopolitics of population control. Raising the point that preventing the birth of such daughters who are anyway “unwanted” by parents, some feminists also argued that sex-selective abortion should be an acceptable practice if it can save a girl from a life of misery (Kumar 1983)—an argument that was also used by parliamentarians while debating abortion as a population control mechanism (Menon 1995).

A significant facilitator in the process of pushing the state’s agenda of population control at the time was the influx of wide-ranging imaging technologies and scientific advancements that made the process of sex determination and sex selection easier, both from an economic and, significantly, a moral perspective. Since the early 1980s, new reproductive technologies such as ultrasound, and procedures like amniocentesis which allowed the determination of the sex of unborn foetuses, began to play a critical role in facilitating changes in the biopolitics of population in India (Hvistendahl 2011). While such technological advancements were intended to detect foetal abnormalities and to assist pregnancies, “people took to these new technologies with great alacrity, finding in them a way of fulfilling their family building goals without the handicap of a large family” (Kaur 2020).

The use of such technologies that did not necessitate the killing of a child who had already been born also helped elide the moral turpitude and guilt around female infanticide and made this form of sex selection more acceptable. Governing fertility through technology and choosing desirable family compositions came to be seen as “scientific”, “rational” and “modern” among the middle and upper classes, while the inability of the poor to control family size came to be viewed as emblematic of regressive attitudes.

While initial reservations about such technologies or their adoption at a large scale for sex-selective abortions were dismissed by scholars, leading in fact to debates on whether such sex-selective abortions could potentially increase the value of daughters and result in positive change (Kumar 1983; Dube 1983; Arora 1996; Kaur et al. 2016), the use of such procedures became widespread by the 1990s, reaching the remotest and poorer sections of society and being adopted in large numbers (John et al. 2008). By the late 2000s, the tangible result of such processes was a significant shift in India’s demography, with a skewed sex ratio at birth of 110 boys for every 100 girls (UNFPA 2020; Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015).

The Gendered Biopolitics of Reproduction Governance: Policing Female Bodies

Although the understanding of biopolitics as population regulation can be applied easily to the state’s approach through the 70s and 80s in India, little attention has been paid to its embedded patriarchal and gendered connotations. A recognition of the specifically gendered outcomes of purportedly “neutral” policies intended to tackle a separate problem of population control, or advancing medical technology, leads one to formulate the idea of a “gendered” biopolitics (see Mansfield 2012). We argue that the attempts of the state to regulate medical machinery and women’s bodies through social policies constituted gendered biopolitics of reproduction governance, which resulted not only in direct psychological and material harm to women but also contributed in intensifying social prejudice against daughters.

Even as the Indian scenario was different from the case of a country like China, with its one child policy and strict, coercive regulation of reproduction, policies to promote the girl child in India as well as population control mechanisms adopted by the state we argue have always been heavily enmeshed in biopolitical discourses that sought to valorize the birth of “valuable sons” while asking parents to “let daughters be born”—thereby promoting specific kinds of meaning and attributing lower value to women and daughters through the very exercise of policy formulation. In the case of the family planning programme, for instance, despite its attempt to be gender fair in programming (depicting the ideal family as consisting of a girl and a boy), the impulse to make family sizes smaller propelled many to choose sons over daughters as fertility declined faster than son preference (Das Gupta and Mari Bhat 1997; Jayachandran 2017).

“Disciplining the sex ratio”—as Purewal (2014) describes the state’s subsequent efforts to address the skewed sex ratio—has taken place through a two-pronged approach: the first prong being the criminalization of sex-selective abortion and the other, through policies and schemes at the national and state levels to “save the girl child”. Despite strict disciplining efforts effected through mass surveillance of female bodies by overzealous bureaucrats and civil society members, as well as penalization of medical practitioners facilitating sex-selective abortions through legal methods, the implementation of remedial measures was made ineffectual by the loopholes in the law against sex determination that did not question the “desirability, safety or social implications of prenatal diagnostic techniques” (Arora 1996, 423). The use of incentive-based policies like cash transfers, on the other hand, was criticized for their implicit devaluation of daughters, seeing as they exhorted parents to “save” the girl child from an unfortunate fate, often as an altruistic act, imploring them to see the emotional value of a daughter while the state “assisted” them in their efforts.Footnote 2 Feminist scholars have criticized such policies as an attempt to commodify daughters or inadvertently reassert stereotypes around daughters as economic and social liabilities, without attacking the core premise of daughter aversion, seeking instead to “compensate” for it (Nanda et al. 2014; Drèze and Kingdon 2001).

As a result, several scholars have claimed that the criminalization of sex-selective abortion as well as paternalistic girl child policies followed by the Indian state have been ineffective in addressing what the root cause of the problem is—the political economy of son preference and the sociocultural devaluation of daughters which has persisted despite the presence of such policies (Rahm 2019; Eklund and Purewal 2017; Perwez 2016; John et al. 2008). This makes the existing exercise of such policies as weakly symbolic and performative, without in fact attacking either the core of why such practices continue or what can be done to change them, especially at the family level.

In the following sections, we analyse how the political economy of son preference and daughter devaluation is operationalized and reproduced through biosocial strategies of the household and whether certain equalizing shifts in the household space might hold hope for the future.

Biosocial Household Strategies: “Composing” the Family

While sufficient attention has been paid to the role of the state and new technologies in shaping the gendered demographic outcome described above, the in-between space of the family household unit—a socially constructed but collectively recognized unit (Bourdieu 1998)—where biological and social reproduction take place and where son preference and daughter aversion are actively produced, has been less focused upon. The family in such a scenario becomes the site and medium through which individuals and, consequently, the population, are acted upon, through specific “biosocial” strategies that operate over and above, as well as in conjunction with the biopolitics of the state.

We argue that these strategies, whether conscious or unconscious, are not merely decisions around the biological number and sex of children to be produced but are also social strategies oriented to family mobility in the context of contemporary political economies. The norm of smaller family compositions already valorized and disseminated by state discourses as aspirational and enmeshed in larger narratives about “modernity” gets further reinforced in a neoliberal political economy with rising consumerism and rising costs of raising children, forcing patriarchal families to choose fewer children and of the “right” sex. The gendered biopolitics of reproduction in the household then operates by making the woman, as mother and as female body, “responsible” for producing the socially “desired” or “right” family, smaller in size, composed of the necessary son or sons, and one in which daughters might be entirely dispensable. The availability of new technologies of sex selection further enhances the burden of responsibility on the woman, closing off traditionally accepted justifications for the lack of son/s as nature, fate or God’s will. The other option, of continuing to reproduce until the desired number of sons was born, resulting in a large family, is no longer acceptable in aspirational modern families.

By placing the household at the centre of the understanding of where and how the biopolitics of reproduction is operationalized, we expand on the analysis of how daughter devaluation is dynamically produced, not simply as a reiteration of past traditions of son preference or the mere “marriage of tradition and technology” but in response to changing political economies and the availability of new tools of family shaping. We also point towards prospects of change from within the household, since it is also the space where the post-birth unequal bio-value of sons and daughters is built through gendered entitlements and investments.

Women’s Bodies: Using Technology to Produce the “Right” Family

It is the family household as the site of mobility desires that assigns a particular role to female bodies—as mothers, wives and daughters and as vehicles for achieving family goals. In their role as mothers, women are made responsible for biologically producing the “desired” and “right” family consisting of fewer children but with more or only sons. The blame for not producing sons is placed squarely on women and their bodies, and a woman’s inability to give birth to a son or sons risks her abandonment, the taking of a second wife by the husband or, at the least, continuous mistreatment at the hands of the husband and in-laws (John et al. 2008).

The availability of new technologies that can facilitate the production of such a family through unnatural means becomes an apparatus of power, encompassing science, reason and modernity, forcing women to subject themselves to risky and painful procedures such as multiple abortions or repeated rounds of in vitro fertilization, with little choice to resist. The association of technology with science, modernity and rationality colludes with the desire to shape a modern, ideal family—small but with sons—and enhances the responsibility of the woman to ensure such an outcome. Despite the multiple agents in the decision to abort or prevent the birth of a girl child (keeping in mind that the decision to abort, whether sex-selectively or otherwise in the Indian context, is never an individual one), the onus of carrying out the decision thus falls on the individual woman and on women as species, gendering reproduction in yet-newer ways.

In their report “Planning Families, Planning Gender”, John et al. (2008) suggest that the use of such technologies is seen as a more “scientific” and “rational” way of planning families, making it much more “efficient” than existing processes such as female infanticide or neglect of female infants and girl children. Not only the mobile middle classes but also urban and rural residents began to avail of the ultrasound to detect the sex of the unborn foetus and abort female foetuses, leading to an estimated 461,500 “missing” female births in the country due to GBBS (UNFPA 2020).

The widespread acceptance of the sex determination through ultrasound imaging and its normalization itself needs to be demystified, as Arora (1996) underlines. She asks how women and families are persuaded to use these technologies and whether there is real choice involved in doing so (Oomman and Ganatra 2002). Pointing towards the unethical concealing of unknown risks and adverse effects of such technologies on women, Arora (1996, 420) highlights the role of professional and commercial interests of the medical community in legitimizing the discourse of acceptance of such technologies. She argues that “discursive space is created for their acceptance by state, private interests and patriarchal society despite their risks and unethical consequences”, thereby implanting an unjust meaning into the notion of rights or choice. Thus, women as mothers, and daughters who are prevented from being born, bear the burden and the costs of social reproduction that lie at the heart of the patriarchal capitalist system of accumulation.

Sex Selection as Mobility: Gender and Class

In her article, “Fertility as Mobility”, Greenhalgh (1988, 667) states that “childbearing aspirations are not primarily ends in themselves, but means to other, larger ends, and that these broader goals are related to couples’ desires to secure and, if possible, also advance their position in their social reference groups, be they neighborhoods, villages, or national societies”. She outlines her proposition that adjusting family size or fertility to opportunities in the economic and institutional environment is associated with social mobility aspirations (Greenhalgh 1988, 653). Examining one-child families in India, Basu and Desai (2016) similarly reiterates that low fertility is associated with aspirations of social mobility through the advancement of one’s children. For this, they argue that Indian parents invest heavily in the education of one or at most two children they give birth to.

Patriarchal Indian families have long depended on sons not only to support parents in old age but also to ensure family mobility. Aileen Ross, noting higher educational ambitions for sons, puts it well: “A good deal of the anxiety for sons to do well is due to the belief that the son’s success will reflect back on the family and eventually bring it a higher standard of living.” (Quoted in Caldwell et al. 1985, 31). Since daughters, as transient members of the natal household are disallowed from fulfilling the roles that sons are depended on for, they are less desired, with too many daughters being perceived as a drain on family resources. To ensure family mobility, aspirational families thus employ the biosocial strategy of shaping the desired small family of more sons and fewer or no daughters, through the “scientific” “rational” and “modern” method of sex-selective abortion of female foetuses. Richer families who wish to ensure sons might even resort to more expensive pre-conception techniques of implanting a male foetus.

Thus Greenhalgh’s “fertility as mobility” hypothesis can easily be extended to argue that in India, sex selection, together with reduced fertility, functions as a mobility strategy.

Despite mobility being a goal of the majority of families across the class structure, it is couples in the “emerging middle class”, in contrast with those in the more “stable” rungs of the middle class, who resort to GBSS in much larger numbers with the goal of ensuring their ascent into the stable middle class (Kaur et al. 2016). It is also worth noting that the steep deterioration in child sex ratios (sex ratios of children between the ages of 0–6) noticed in India’s 2001 census coincided with the expansion of this class following neoliberal economic reforms that began in the mid-1980s, steadily gaining ground in the 1990s.Footnote 3 The overlap of sharply declining fertility, availability of new sex selection technologies enabling the abortion of unwanted female foetuses and the numerical expansion of couples in aspirational classes together impacted the country’s demography, resulting in millions of missing girls.

Building Differential Bio-Value of Sons and Daughters: Entitlements and Investments

The household is also the space where the post-birth “bio-value” of children—an outcome of children’s gendered entitlements and parental investments in them—is built in accordance with social norms that create a cultural consensus around distributive justice in which girls and women receive less (Papanek 1990). Although research has explored the differential allocation of resources such as nutrition, healthcare and education in the household (Dixit et al. 2020; Anukriti et al. 2016; Barcellos et al. 2014; Miller 1997b; Das Gupta 1987) and the role of various kinship, labour, old-age support and ritual systems in shaping the differential value of sons and daughters (Das Gupta 2010; Dyson and Moore 1983; Miller 1997b), the role of dynamic and shifting parental attitudes in shaping the bio-value of children has been less examined (Hu and Schlosser 2015; Clark 2016; John 2018).

We examine parental actions vis-a-vis the two sexes as “gendered biopolitics” of the family. Its significance for the problem of sex selection lies in that it engages with the logics of static or shifting parental investments in building the bio-value stored in the bodies of male and female children. As pointed out earlier, decision-making pertaining to sex-specific investments in children is framed not only by the social structure but also by strategies aimed at upward mobility. There is thus a processual quality to such strategies which is not captured by concentrating only on allocations and outcomes; one has to understand these strategies as being responsive to the shifting external environment—which is both economic and social.

We focus on the accumulation of “bio-capital” that favours sons over daughters as the differential capabilities that are allowed to be stored in the male versus female child body itself. Bourdieu, in his work on the forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986), segregates capital into economic, social and cultural and explains how embodied capital (carried on the body) and institutional capital (built through education), as forms of cultural capital, are built creating differences in capabilities, in this case between male and female children. From a young age, differential entitlements and investments in sons over daughters, whether with respect to nutrition, health or education, render the girl child incapable of competing at the same pedestal as the son, not only in the social patriarchal context (as a transient member of her natal family who will contribute her productive, reproductive and care labour to her husband’s family) but also at an individual level, when compared to the male child.

In their report, “What happens to living girls”, Pande and Malhotra (2006) find that during early childhood, girls in India suffer health and nutritional discrimination such that by age 5, 6% more girls are severely stunted and 13% unvaccinated when compared to sons, which only increases with birth order of daughters, especially in the case where the family has no sons. Other studies also confirm the bias in nutrition and immunization between sons and daughters in India, with son preference being recognized as responsible for the high malnourishment rates in the country (Borooah 2004; Pande 2003; Jayachandran and Pande 2017). However, the debate over whether discrimination against the girl child translates into lesser care at the household level remains unresolved (Dixit et al. 2020). A further debate is around whether the gap in care and entitlements is reducing, a point we pay particular attention to later in this article.

By refusing or permitting lesser human capital, or what we refer to as the “bio-capital” of a daughter to be built, through a consistent denial or disadvantage to daughters (both in resource-constrained environments as well as through “socially acceptable practices” of the limits to education, access to job opportunities, etc.), the household becomes the site where the primary devaluation of the girl child takes place. Such devaluation ultimately gets reproduced at a societal level and is reiterated in legal and sociopolitical institutions that accept such “value” without contestation. This reduced bio-value of daughters, and the limited opportunities available to daughters to harness the potential stored in their own bodies, we argue, then becomes responsible for perpetuating natal inequities that further strengthen and perpetuate son preference and daughter aversion, notwithstanding the class or social standing of the household in question.

A cycle of sons who are valuable to the family household as future breadwinners and daughters who are unable to support parents and enhance the natal family’s fortunes (since they move away at marriage in conformity with the norm of patrilocality) is perpetuated by the gender unequal bio-value inculcated in the family space. In the absence of change that allows girls to harness the potential stored in their bodies, the lower “value” attributed to daughters would be difficult to alter.

Following Croll (2006), we argue that in order to bring about change, it is important to examine the conditions for shifts in parental attitudes towards girls’ entitlements, socialization and expectations in the household environment where they are lived and acted out. Among such conditions are equal entitlements not only with respect to bio-capital building investments such as food, nutrition, healthcare and education but also changes in social structural features such as compulsory marriage, patri-virilocal residence and unequal property inheritance. Since support in old age and pursuit of social mobility through sons are crucial to gender discriminatory practices in the household, it is the ability of daughters to perform similar functions vis-a-vis parents that likely holds the potential for changing the biopolitics of the household.

Signs of Change?

A perusal of recent literature suggests that the aversion towards daughters has begun to change somewhat resultant from various forces, global and local, of ideologies of gender equality, pushing parents to treat the two genders alike, at least in entitlements of health and education that contribute to human capital accumulation. Previous studies consistently showed a gender bias in treatment of girl children—Miller’s (1997a) review of studies on intra-household food allocation showed a bias against girls; Corsi et al.’s (2009) study of immunization covering data up to 2006 showed gender differences in immunization coverage, especially for girls born at higher birth orders. Barcellos et al. (2014) found that girls in larger families were breastfed for a shorter period and got less vitamin supplements. Recent studies, however, show such biases reducing while acknowledging the deterioration of the sex ratio at birth due to sex selection. Dixit et al. (2020, 10) argue that “much of the literature on sex discrimination in preventive and curative healthcare for children or sex differences in child health status is either outdated or based on small local studies”. Basing their analysis on NFHS-4Footnote 4 data, they find that there was “no evidence of sex differentials in immunization coverage but a small degree of discrimination in favour of boys in medical treatment for common symptoms of infection” (2020, 1). They emphatically conclude that “sex discrimination in immunization has disappeared” (2020, 10). They did not find evidence that healthcare or health status of girls was influenced by the presence of other daughters in the family, trends that are different from earlier findings (2020, 1). A recent study in southern India for which data was collected in 2013 found that boys were nutritionally more disadvantaged than girls, a finding contrary to many earlier studies (Jawaregowda and Angadi 2017). Equally encouraging is the news on the closing of the gap between male and female infant mortality, as World Bank data for 2019 shows. There are now 28 deaths for both sexes per 1000 live births (World Bank 2020).

Other recent studies also find an improving trend in girls’ treatment by parents. Thus, Anukriti et al. (2016, Abstract), while investigating “the impact of sex detection technologies on son-biased fertility stopping behaviour, parental investments in girls relative to boys and the relative chances of girls surviving after birth”, find “a moderation of son-biased fertility, erosion of gender gaps in breastfeeding and immunization and complete convergence in the post-neonatal mortality rates of boys and girls”. Although fewer girls are born as a result of sex selection, worsening the sex ratio at birth, the study provides evidence to show less discriminatory and near gender-equal treatment of those girls who are born. Hu and Schlosser (2015) have a similar finding of reduction in girls’ malnutrition in regions with a rising trend of prenatal sex selection. Such studies, however, raise a question about gender justice—will girls be treated better only if there are fewer of them? (Kumar 1983; Goodkind 1996).

Overall, it appears that studies based on data up to the third round of NFHS, up to 2005–2006, show more pervasive discrimination while those based on the latest round of NFHS (2015–2016) show sharp reduction in gender inequalities in healthcare provision. Despite the absolute lower value of girls in India (especially in its northern and north-western regions) evident in its skewed sex ratios, the relative value of girls allowed to be born appears to be witnessing improvement. This is also an effect of lowered fertility with most couples preferring a family of two with one boy and one girl. According to NFHS-4, 82% of Indian women want at least one son and a similar proportion (79%) also want at least one daughter (Dixit et al. 2020). A working paper by Bhalla et al. (2013, 30) shows that at the worst levels of son preference observed in 2004, only 2.7% of the couples in India practiced son selection. In 2009, with the sex ratio at birth of 107.9, the couples practicing sex selection were down to only 1.2%. Even this reduced number, however, skews the national sex ratio at birth, translating into a large number of missing girls. But what this number also shows is that despite pervasive son preference, a large proportion of couples do not actively eliminate daughters while holding son preference, even in the face of rapid fertility decline, as is evident in the southern regions of the country which have more balanced child sex ratios. And as some of the evidence adduced above seems to indicate, certain other forms of discrimination against girls appear to be reducing, if not disappearing.

Shifting Parental Attitudes: Investing in Daughters’ Education

One of the most crucial areas of intergenerational investments in children that builds their bio-value and where a considerable shift in parental attitudes towards daughters is visible is education. The education of girls, in recent years, has assumed the position of a normative, aspirational ideal, cutting across different demographic and class variations. As scholars like John (2018) find in their fieldwork across states in Haryana and Maharashtra, “education is one of the most obvious indicators of change across generations”, occupying a “very critical place” in the lives of the respondents, highlighted particularly by parents’ desires to educate their children, across all strata and irrespective of gender. “Education at least school education”, she argues, “has become normative, if not compulsory for this cohort of children in comparison to their mothers. It is approached as the most positive aspect of contemporary life upon which everything depends” (2018, 17, emphasis added). With the elevation of education as a “social good”, parental willingness to invest equally in the education of children of either sex has improved tremendously, with many willing to make sacrifices for the sake of providing quality education for their children irrespective of material costs (Clark 2016; Clark and Sekher 2007; Froerer 2012).

Thus, gender parity in education among children less than 15 years old increased from 94.6% in 2004/2005, to 99.6% in 2017/2018. Gender parity among those between 15 and 24 years of age increased from 73.7% in 2004/2005 to 86% in 2017/2018. A crucial index of changing parental attitudes is the presence of women in higher education at 48.6% in 2017–2018 (AISHE 2019), indicating that parents are willing to allow daughters to study for longer with expectations of their entering respectable professional employment. There is increasing evidence in qualitative studies that mothers have high aspirations for daughters’ education and fathers are increasingly supportive of their education, work and careers (Caldwell et al. 1985; Clark 2016; Tara and Vigneswara Ilavarasan 2009; Gupta 2012). Thus, Caldwell et al. (1985, 39), writing as far back as the mid-1980s on the educational transition in South India, while surveying parents’ attitudes towards education and of the educational strategies they followed with their children, found that “perhaps the most surprising finding is that over a quarter of daughters were reportedly educated for better employment”. Ramachandran (2003, 18), in a comprehensive survey on gender equality in education in India, finds that the effect of “role models/success stories where education has resulted in tangible benefits in terms of social status and/or livelihood/upward mobility” is “exceptionally strong” for girls, while it is only “strong” for boys. While a daughter’s education might be oriented to making a good marriage (or surviving a bad one), or towards making her a good wife and mother, the serendipitous effects of education, both in terms of girls’ increased agency and shifts in parental attitudes, cannot be dismissed. In her study of women engineering undergraduates in Kanpur, a large city in Uttar Pradesh, a state with a highly patriarchal environment, Gupta (2012) documents parental investments in girls’ education and finds that building careers was a significant motivating factor both for parents and girls. A critical mass of girls with higher levels of education could propel a norm change in how their capabilities are viewed by parents and by society at large. Here, Chung and Das Gupta’s (2007) study of the turnaround in sex ratios in South Korea as a result of societal level change in girls’ entitlements and opportunities is illustrative. According to the authors, women’s education contributed as much as 19% of the total decline in son preference.

Parental Aspirations and Building Children’s Bio-Value

Appadurai (2004) highlights the importance of the cultural idea of aspiration—the ability to envision a future—and its significance for the politics of welfare. In this context, Serneels and Dercon (2020, 2014) study the importance of parental aspirations for children’s learning outcomes. Analysing data from the Young Lives Study conducted in Andhra Pradesh, they find that maternal aspirations have a stronger relationship with education outcomes than either maternal or paternal education, even though mothers aspire for a higher level of education for sons than for daughters. More educated mothers have higher aspirations; mothers with one additional year of education aspire to 1.6 years per cent higher education for their child. Mothers’ aspirations for daughters’ education are relational, i.e., in relation to their own educational opportunities or denial thereof; hence, they are increasingly keen that their daughters get the education that they themselves were deprived of. One such mother shares:

“Even though I was not able to study, I now realise how important education is. Hence, we came and settled in the city. All three of my daughters go to school. I do not want them to be left behind like me. Hence, I am getting them educated.”- woman respondent, Dholpur (John et al. 2008, 76).

A daughter shares “Studying for a PhD was first my mother’s dream before it became mine” (personal communication).

Scholars like Clark (2016) and Gupta (2012) discuss the role of parents in facilitating and adopting radical ideas or making sacrifices to promote the education and career of their young daughters, as well as with changes in employment structures for those girls with higher levels of education. Such impulses seem to be especially stronger among the urban middle and upper middle classes. Education has a greater likelihood of providing “respectable” employment which parents seek for their daughters. Professional education of daughters can perform multiple functions in changing the parent-daughter dynamic, by providing “returns” from daughters not only in symbolic, affective and emotional terms but also allowing daughters to take the place reserved previously only for sons—that of primary breadwinners or old age caregivers for their families.

The rapid reduction of the gender gap in education and the entry of large numbers of girls into higher education, including in STEMFootnote 5 disciplines, have feminized the space of higher education providing legitimacy to girls’ presence in public spaces and in the public sphere. Girls’ agency, derived from education, allows them to pose a challenge to social norms; at the same time rising aspirations of parents for daughters reveal a willingness to subvert or manipulate social norms that come in the way, as in the case of girls moving to other cities for education or taking up call centre work that requires working night shifts (Tara and Vigneswara Ilavarasan 2009). Daughters are also being increasingly contrasted with “worthless” sons who are unable to fulfil their filial duties of economic and affective support towards parents and shifting expectations of greater reliance on support from daughters, even married ones (Croll 2006; Purewal and Hashmi 2015; John 2018).

Conclusion

In this article, we started by arguing that the targeting and disciplining of female bodies through state policies and efforts to control increasing population through carrot-and-stick approaches of punitive measures and incentives has not been successful in attacking the root cause of daughter devaluation in the country. Combined with the use of gender-biased sex selection as a social mobility tool by families, this has resulted in gendered demographic and biopolitical outcomes, while creating discourses that have further cemented daughter dis-preference both at the familial and social levels. We argue that it is necessary to examine the in-between space of the family household, where parental family building decisions embedded in a patriarchal society with a predominant preference for sons respond to the external socioeconomic environment by employing biosocial strategies to ensure family mobility, most often at the cost of daughters.

However, recent research points towards signs of change in parental attitudes towards daughters who are allowed to be born. Despite the overall female unfriendly habitus, we find some hope in declining differentials in investments between sons and daughters, especially in the arena of health and education, which is critical towards narrowing the gap in the “bio-value” of sons and daughters in parents’ eyes. Although structural edifices and prevailing sociocultural norms continue to inhibit the replacement of sons with daughters within the family structure, greater preference for at least one daughter, lowering levels of discrimination in resource allocation and entitlements point towards changing strategies within the family household unit. It is in such shifts, where parents and daughters negotiate jointly against patriarchal structures, that the hope of reversing natality inequality and higher post-birth mortality of girls might lie.