Gender Composition of Children and the Third Birth in the United States

Parental gender preferences are structural and cultural forces that reify gender difference (Lorber, 1995). In many societies, the dominant preference is for sons. This son preference reflects institutionalized patterns of both inherent difference and hierarchy (e.g., patriarchy). The strength and change in sex ratios and excess fertility due to patriarchy are an active research area in demography (see Bongaarts, 2013). In many Western societies, parents have a mixed gender preference: a desire for at least one son and one daughter. This preference is signaled when those with two sons or two daughters are more likely to intend and to have a third birth compared to parents of one daughter and one son (Hank & Kohler, 2000; Yamaguchi & Ferguson, 1995). This preference indicates that sons and daughters are fundamentally different rather than substitutable. As Williamson (1976) put it, parents "desire variety, based on the notion that the sexes will have different traits, strengths, leisure activities, and interests" (p. 22). Thus, this common gender preference reflects the institutionalized notion of inherent difference (gender essentialism; see Ridgeway, 2009), but not of inherent hierarchy.Our focus, the mixed-gender preference, has been observed for decades in the United States (see Sloane & Lee, 1983). Pollard and Morgan (2002) presented evidence that this mixed-gender preferences weakened in the 1985-1995 period compared to earlier (1955-1985) and claimed that a gender indifference toward offspring was emerging. They predicted a continuation of this trend toward gender indifference (i.e., the disappearance of an effect of mixed-gender fertility preferences) as the gender system shifted from traditional gender roles to partial gender deinstitutionalization (Cherlin, 2004)-a weakening of the social norms that define gendered behavior. After all, women have surpassed men in postsecondary education (Buchmann & Diprete, 2006) and have more dramatically increased their labor force participation and earnings (Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2004). Women's stronger economic standings have also supported greater gender egalitarianism within marriage (Goldscheider, Turcotte, & Kopp, 2001; Heard, 2011; Sweeney, 2002). Children's socialization has changed as well. The proportion of girls participating in organized sports has increased more rapidly than has that of boys over the past three decades. Thus overall, as the lives of boys/men and girls/women become more similar in key ways, parents should have less concern about balancing the gender composition of their children.However, this prediction of declining preference for children of both genders can be challenged because of evidence and argument that the U.S. "gender revolution" has stalled, at least in some respects and for some subgroups (England, 2010). The gender revolution proceeded via schemas stressing individualism and institutional change that granted more equal access. Women took advantage of these changes by moving into many previously male-dominated spheres, and gender was partly deinstitutionalized. But this deinstitutionalization has stalled because of powerful and pervasive schemas of gender essentialism. One example of the stalled revolution is the fact that girls and boys are still perceived and treated as different by many parents. Parents continue to allocate household chores to sons and daughters in gendered ways (Raley & Bianchi, 2006). They also are more likely to expect financial support from sons and care from daughters in old age (Nugent, 2013). Furthermore, the division of household labor remains unequal in most families (Bianchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000; Schneider, 2011), and women's wages lag significantly behind those of men (Cha & Weeden, 2014). Finally, having both sons and daughters fits the dominant schema of "the family": A "storybook" family (Nugent, 2013) is most often portrayed as two biological parents with one son and one daughter. …