Transmission of Sex Preferences Across Generations: The Allocation of Educational Resources Among Siblings

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to test whether there is an intergenerational transmission of gender preferences in educational resource allocation among children. The unique data set of Taiwan’s Panel Study of Family Dynamics project provides us a rich 3-generation education information and allows us to probe into this question. We performed our analysis along two directions: the first is to see whether the society as a whole has any macro change in gender-specific education achievement, and the second is to see whether there is any within-lineage transmission of gender preferences across generations. After carefully reviewing the education system and societal characteristics in Taiwan, we set up an empirical model to estimate and test the hypotheses of intergenerational transmission of gender preferences. We also perform various statistical analyses to support our findings, e.g. contraposition of a proposition. As far as the macro pattern is concerned, we found that although there is a clear tendency of differential treatment against females in the old generation, this tendency is significantly weakened and nearly vanishes in the young generation. Furthermore, the supporting effect of senior siblings in the old generation becomes a crowding (resource-dilution) effect in the young generation. However, within each micro lineage, there is a mild “habitus” effect in gender-specific educational resource allocation in the sense that parents who had the experience of gender-specific differential treatment tend to treat their children in a similar fashion. Moreover, this mild habitus effect is stronger for female respondents (who were the deprived group) than for male respondents (who were the privileged group).