Hidden Gender Gaps in Child Poverty

While son preference in India is well documented, measuring gender differences in children’s consumption remains challenging because consumption is typically observed only at the household level. We estimate gender-specific child consumption using a collective household model and data from rural India. We find substantial within-household inequality: boys consume systematically more household resources than girls. Translating these allocations into individual-level poverty, roughly 63.5 percent of girls are poor, compared to 56.3 percent of boys. These gaps account for age- and sex-specific needs, persist throughout childhood, and are largely invisible to standard household-level poverty measures. We further show that son-biased fertility stopping behavior contributes to the gender gap in child poverty by increasing girls’ exposure to larger families with fewer resources per child, explaining about one-fifth of the overall gap. Finally, combining our model-based poverty estimates with administrative mortality data, we show that hidden gender gaps in child poverty can account for one in five Indian missing girls.