total number of children that people want falls, leaving less space for tolerating daughters. There is some evidence of this in the disaggregated data: for example, sex ratios at birth rise sharply with parity in Table 3, especially amongst women who have not borne a son.<sup>28</sup> Figure 2 shows another interesting feature. There are sharp annual fluctuations in the sex ratio at birth which is related to the cycle of animal years: fewer girls were born in the animal years deemed to be associated with personality characteristics which would not make for good wives.<sup>29</sup> These annual fluctuations are much smaller after the mid-1990s, suggesting that as people abandoned their traditional beliefs about the place of men in the universe, they also abandoned their beliefs about personality characteristics associated with animal years.

# **_Trends in underlying son preference:_**

Women’s reported underlying son preference has been declining sharply over time. Table 2 shows a steady decline between birth cohorts in the percentage reporting that they “must have a son”. Two-thirds of the oldest women interviewed in 1991 stated that they “must have a son”, and this fell to below 30 percent amongst the youngest women interviewed in 1991.

Figure 3 shows the proportion of women in successive surveys who reported that they “must have a son” fell slowly between 1985 and 1991, and then precipitately. Clearly the decline in underlying son preference was snowballing through the population. As mentioned above, this reported intensity of son preference is clearly associated with actual family-building behavior (Table 3).

The most striking evidence of a secular decline in son preference is the fact that women with similar individual characteristics showed lower son preference in 2003 than in 1991 (Table 5). Comparing the responses obtained from women of the same birth cohort in 1991 and 2003 shows that, in each birth cohort, there was an approximate halving of the proportions reporting strong son preference over this 12-year period (Table 2). For example, 35 percent of women born in 1955-64 said that they “must have a son” when interviewed in 1991, but only 19 percent of them were still of this view in 2003. This secular trend in son preference is analogous to that shown in responses about family size preferences in India, where it is not uncommon for older women to say “In my day we reproduced like animals, but things have changed and I have told my daughter-in-law to get sterilized after two children”.

# **5.  Correlates of son preference: Odds of stating “must have a son”**

# **_Summary statistics: univariate analysis_**

The univariate analysis of the socio-economic characteristics that we hypothesize to be associated with son preference show associations in the expected directions (results not shown). This includes the woman’s and her husband’s education, occupation, urban/rural residence, and religion; whether the husband is the only son of his parents; whether the couple live with their parents; whether the parents decided the marriage; and the woman’s birth cohort and age at marriage. All these variables show significant differences in the expected directions, in both the 1991 and 2003 surveys — son preference declines with increasing socio-economic status, lower parental control, younger birth cohort, and older age at marriage. “Buddhists” show significantly higher son preference, as do women whose husbands are the only son, couples who live with their parents, and those whose marriages were decided by their parents. And where 9