Identifying Gender Bias in Parental Attitude: An Experimental Approach

Using experimental techniques, we identify parental attitudes toward different-gendered children in rural Bangladesh. We randomly selected households that had at least two school-age children (6–18 years) of different genders. Parents, either jointly or individually, were given endowments to allocate, freely or restricted, for the benefit of anonymous girls or boys at a nearby school. The results suggest that: 1) there is no systematic inherent bias in parental attitudes toward children of a specific gender; 2) neither parent is systematically biased; 3) there are no significant differences in parents’ behavior; and 4) tests suggest that subjects revealed their true preferences.