RISING SONS

odd man in?
I caught this very, very interesting story on NPR yesterday: "Male Birth Rate Among Asian Americans Studied".

Here's the short version: Columbia Univ. economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund studied the 2000 Census and found that, for Chinese, Korean and Asian Indian American parents, those with two daughters (as their first two children) were 50% more likely to have a son for their third child. This simply isn't naturally possible, suggesting that there is some kind of sex selection going on though the researchers have been very careful not to draw conclusions as to what form said selection takes since they didn't collect data on that part of the question.

Here's the personal anecdote: I've known at least two Asian American families growing up where the parents had four daughters. Not that I ever asked the parents but you just assume, in those cases, they're trying for that son and finally gave up.

Here's getting back to Almond/Edlund's study. I took a look at the summary version of their research (warning: you need to be logged into a university system to access) which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some findings worth sharing:

The son-biased ratio (SBR) is apparently new - there was no evidence of such a bias in the 1990 Census. This suggests one of two things (at least): sex selection was less popular then (unlikely) or sex selection technology is more popular now (more likely).

The 1.5:1 SBR at third parity (i.e. after two daughters) is actually higher than what it is in India (1:39:1) though still lower than China in 1990 (2:25 : 1) though the restrictions put on by the one-child rule in China goes a long, long way to explaining how ridiculously out-of-whack their SBR tends towards. However, the fact that it's higher here compared to India (and I think South Korea as well) could also bolster the argument that sex selection methods and technology are more readily available/accessible in the U.S. than elsewhere.

The study compares Asian Americans to Whites (Whites show no statistically significant bias one gender or another) though I'd be curious to see what it looks like compared with African American and Latino American populations. I would still expect that the Asian American SBR to be higher, regardless, 1) because I think patriarchal preference for sons is more entrenched and 2) I think sex selection is less ethically challenging for Asian Americans compared to say, Catholic-raised Latinos (this presumes abortion is one primary method of sex selection).

"Male bias...was true irrespective of the mother's citizenship status" - which suggests that it may not just be immigrant families, but also American-raised families who exhibit a SBR.

"SBR were found despite the absence of many of the factors advanced to rationalize son bias in [Asia] such as China's one-child policy, high dowry payments (India), patrilocal marriage patterns (all three countires) or reliance on children for old age support and physical security." In other words, the SBR in the U.S. makes even less sense here than it does elsewhere in the world. But then again, it's not like patriarchy has ever required much rationalization to assert itself.

It should be noted that in families where a first-born son is present, there's no subsequent SBR with future children, meaning that one could read this finding as suggesting that what Asian Americans really want is at least one son but past that, they're fine with daughters. But they really want that son.

Small aside, but the study claims that Chinese, Koreans and Indians, collectively, make up less than 2% of the overall U.S. population. Accepting that the study is leaving out the second biggest Asian ethnic group (Filipinos), I think their math is wrong. Check it yourself: those three populations - not even accounting for people of mixed-Chinese/Korean/Indian descent - would still be over 2% of the total U.S. population, according to Census 2000 figures.

So what does this all mean?

For starters, let's just ask the unspoken question here: are Asian Americans more likely to use abortion as a means for sex selection? Given the wide availability and affordability of prenatal sex testing and abortion (compared to ineffective or more expensive means of sex selection), it's a rational economic argument that, if you were going to sex select, testing + abortion would be the way to go.

I was looking at the CDC's abortion surveillance stats but given that 1) I'm not a quant guy and 2) it's past midnight, I'm not sure if these tell us anything meaningful since, 1) Asian American women are aggregated with Native Americans and others under the always-popular "Other" category so it's impossible to parse the numbers down just for Asian Americans, let alone just Chinese/Korean/Indian. 2) Table 14 suggests that Other women (presumably including Asian Americans) over the age of 30 are more likely to pursue an abortion relative to White and Blacks in the same respective age group but since Table 14 measures overall abortions rather than per capita, I'm not sure one can read the chart as suggesting that the abortion rates are actually higher within those populations vis a vis others. Maybe someone who is more stat-trained and/or awake than I can crunch that.

Even taking the abortion angle off the table - and I noticed a pro-life group is already using the study to suggest that Asian Americans are abortion-crazy - the study confirms something that most of "us" already knew: Asian American society has a patriarchal slant (pun intended), at least when it comes to prioritizing sons. If someone else has a counter-read to this conclusion, I'd be curious to hear what it is.

Lingering questions: First of all, I find it interesting that among my circle of Asian American couples, everyone wanted daughters - not necessarily exclusively, but most certainly at least one, if not the only child they'd ever have. That was certainly true for Sharon and I and we feel pretty lucky we ended up with a daughter (albeit a daughter who doesn't always eat her veggies and is in the middle of a worrisome princess phase but that's another story). But I was struck by how common this seemed to be with other people we know. This could suggest that, given a generation or so, the SBR might fade within Asian America, at least among 2nd and 3rd generation APIs (something, quite notably, the study doesn't parse but perhaps they didn't have access to the necessary data to do so).

Second, and this is a bit of an aside, but the study notes that the biological norm for male/female is 1.05 sons born for every daughter. I'm no evolutionary scholar (but if you are, chime in!) but wouldn't it make sense for that to go the other way? Wouldn't, from an evolutionary point of view, having a higher ratio of women being born be more advantageous, especially since most women only bear one child at a time, with a long gestation period? I don't see the benefit in producing an excess of men when it's really women you need to propagate the species.

Seeing Pink

***originally posted at Anti-Racist Parent***

Before my daughter was born, I knew what kind of father I wanted to be for her. My babygrrl was going to be raised to be a fierce, strong woman of color. I was going to make her iron-on onesies emblazoned with portraits of Yuri Kochiyama, Angela Davis, and Frida Kahlo. Her toybox would be filled with both dolls of color, preferably made by either anti-corporate crafters or small indie companies, and things traditionally coded as “boy” like trucks and cars and tools. Both toy guns and Barbie would be equally verboten in our home, and her closet would be a pink-free zone. I knew the constricting, restricting and damaging messages the world would soon bombard her with about race and gender, and dammit if I wasn’t going to all I could inside our home to inoculate her against them.

So yeah, it would’ve only served me right to have been gifted with a stereotypical “girly girl,” a little karmic payback for putting all my crap on my poor baby’s head before she was even born. That hasn’t happened, luckily–while my Pumpkin’s favorite color, for clothing and everything else, is, of course, pink, she does not, like her best friend since birth, demand to wear Disney Princess costumes as casual wear. As for my plans for a line of “Radical Mama” toddler-tees and stacking the deck toy-wise, well, the first toy I ever bought her was a “Little Frida” doll, and we dubbed the racially ambiguous doll we got her from a line of multiculti dolls by an alum of color from our alma mater “Angela” because of her hair-do. bell hooks’ children’s books are on her overstuffed bookshelves. And because I’m not anti-commercial per se but more anti-certain things (you know?), she’s got more than her fair share of mass-produced goods featuring a certain brown-skinned Latina girl who likes to have adventures and help her animal friends, as well as her current favorite, the Backyardigans (who, I’m convinced, are kids of color–I mean, Pablo? Tasha? Tyrone? Uniqua?)

Suffice it to say that as much as possible, her mother and I try to mediate potentially negative messages embedded in popular and commercial culture by controlling what she consumes (at least in our home) and by talking with her about things that might be problematic. But of course, none of this gets any easier as kids get older, with more and more outside influence impinging on them. During her year in day care, she’d come home talking about t.v. shows we didn’t watch at home, or pretending to shoot things with her fingers like one of the little boys there. “Where did you learn that, Pumpkin?” we’d ask, before explaining why we didn’t shoot things or people. Now that she’s started preschool, I know there will be more of these teachable moments, even though we found as progressive and diverse a school environment as we could in our town.

But what’s really got me thinking, about the subtle and insidious effect of both popular culture and the influence of other kids on how our Pumpkin learns to see the world and her place in it, is how she’s started to label things as gender-appropriate or -inappropriate. It started cropping up during the recent holiday consumption season, during our trips to the local Target and Costco. One time, she was looking at some kids’ room furnishings at Target, which, of course, are separated into a mostly blue boy aisle and a mostly pink girl aisle. There was some Thomas the Tank Engine stuff in the boy aisle, and she called out “Thomas!” happily when she saw it. “Want to look at that stuff, sweetie?” I asked. “No,” she said, “that’s for boys.”

I stopped the cart. Say what now? She’s always loved trains in general and Thomas specifically, so where did this come from? “No, love, anybody can play with Thomas, boys and girls, right?” But the moment was past and her attention was already on something else. But I was disturbed. I mean, I wasn’t naive, I knew these messages, what was appropriate for boys to play with, what was appropriate for girls to play with, were out there, bombarding her on TV and even in the choices and behaviors of her friends. But I always thought that the messages coming from home were enough to counteract these–that she could play with anything she wanted (well, not guns or Bratz, but you know what I mean), that she could do anything, that these things weren’t limited because she was a girl.

Not long after, in the holiday gift section at Costco, I was checking out a Fisher Price kids’ digital camera. There were two models, a big stack of blue toddler cameras and a big stack of pink ones. Apropos of nothing, The Pumpkin pointed at the two stacks: “That one’s for boys and that one’s for girls.” “No baby, anybody can have any color camera they want, right, Mommy? A boy can have a pink one and a girl can have a blue one if they want.” But she wasn’t having it–she knew who was supposed to have what, by color.

It was a digital camera, of all things. Of all the toys that did not need to be gender-coded, I thought, this would be it. It was the exact same toy, the only difference was the color. Did there really need to be a “boy” camera and a “girl” camera? I mean, c’mon! Needless to say, when it came time to buy presents, both the boy and the girls on our list got a different brand of camera–one that came in orange.

It doesn’t end there. Where I always thought that I knew where the issues would be coming from–deflecting and deprogramming hegemonic lessons that toy kitchens were for girls and only boys could play with Tonka trucks from commercials that smacked of biological determinism–now even gender-neutral toys aren’t so neutral. Does LeapFrog, for example, really need to make blue and pink versions of their kiddie learning computers? Is it that important to brand something as “for boys” or “for girls“? Will boys only use a computer if the learning game is branded with Disney’s Cars? Will girls only use it if the game is branded with Disney’s Princesses? And what if a girl likes Cars? Or a boy likes Princesses? What then? Or will they not even think to ask, having imbibed the blue=boy/pink=girl lesson for too long already?

I think about all the societal forces bombarding my daughter and her friends, and I don’t want to feel powerless to do anything. The other night, one of The Pumpkin’s best friends, a little boy she’s known since birth, was frantic because he couldn’t find another chair in which to sit at the kids’ table for dinner. He refused, absolutely refused, to sit in a Dora-emblazoned chair because it was Dora, and Dora is for girls. No matter how much I or his parents tried to convince him that that wasn’t the case, and that he could sit in the chair, he wouldn’t change his mind. He wouldn’t play dress-up with the girls, either, since the Disney Princess gear was obviously not for boys. Another boy in our group of friends, however, wouldn’t hesitate to put on one of those tiaras. He unabashedly loves Dora and the Princesses, and his parents support that love. But what messages does he get at preschool, I wonder, from both teachers and other kids, when he shares that love with others?

I’m tired of seeing pink. I’m tired of seeing blue. And I’m both pissed off and saddened deeply that at age three, my daughter and her friends, both girls and boys, have already learned to see those colors, and what they are supposed to mean, so well. And I know that this isn’t the last time I’m going to start a sentence with, “No, baby, both boys and girls can….”