Gender Inequality and Child Nutritional Status



Gender Inequality and Child Nutritional Status: A Cross Country Analysis

Anish Kumar Mukhopadhyay

Abstract

Food security has specific importance for the women in developing countries. They are more likely to experience malnutrition and health related hazards than their male counterparts. This actually originates from the existence of biased allocation of intra household resources. From the available literature it has been gathered that the empowerment of women has a direct impact on reduction of hunger and the provision of basic needs in education, health, income etc. Female empowerment is also important for the lives of the most vulnerable segment of the population-children. Children could be deemed the most food insecure part of the population because food shortage, poverty and deprivation are likely to have the harshest effects on them given their vulnerability.

This paper basically deals with the following issues and tries to make a comparative study between two different time periods. In particular the study has been done to get an idea as to how nutritional status of children fares between in a cross-national perspective with an improvement in gender specific achievement indicators. It has also been tried to get an idea about the degree of association between food security, gender inequality and development in this connection. Attempt has been made to find out the most significant variable that is responsible for having any possible trend between gender inequality and child nutritional status over time in an econometric framework. Findings are an important cross-national extension of existing research, utilizing new measures that capture the development dynamic.

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Indian Council of Social Science Research , Centre For Studies In Social Sciences, Calcutta

Introduction

Gender inequality is a well-known and still widespread reality in the developing countries. One of its most noted manifestations is the unnaturally low Juvenile Female Male Ratio (JFMR) in these areas. Among its proximate determinants are sex differences in domains such as abortion, infanticide, child health care and child nutrition. Child weight and height performance can be viewed as the output of a health production function whose inputs include elements such as nutritional intakes, exposure to infections and health care. In this sense, height and weight are affected by virtually all of the pathways through which gender bias operates. Anthropometric indicators are also extremely important because there is a well-documented relationship between child malnutrition and poor adult outcomes. When evaluating gender differences, another advantage of nutritional status versus, nutrient intakes, morbidity or health care is that the former is easily measured and therefore much less prone to measurement error or reporting bias.

According to the FAO mostly women and children experience hunger as a defining characteristic of their lives. Nearly 96% of those suffering from hunger live in the developing countries with Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia (SA) the hardest hit (FAO, WFP, 2000). There are numerous ways to describe food security. The FAO provides one of them as “when people must live with hunger and fear starvation”(FAO, 1999,P.1). Reutilinger defines food insecurity as lacking “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active healthy life.”(Reutlinger, 1986,p.1). Food insecurity thus denotes prevalence of hunger in a society, emphasizing the structural factors affecting an individual, household, group, or country without guaranteed access to food. Tweeten (1997) notes that food security is comprised of three components-food availability, access and utilization. For food security to exist there must be a reliable supply of food that can be obtained that is nutritionally adequate for a healthy life. Uvin (1994) mentions that food security concerns food shortage, poverty, and deprivation. Food shortage refers to supply of food available to a population (Uvin, 1994,p.1), but like availability is inadequate on its own. Thus, one must also consider food poverty, which exists when persons cannot “obtain sufficient food to meet the nutritional needs of their members due to inadequate income, poor access to productive resources, inability to benefit from private or public food transfers, or lack of other entitlements to food (Uvin, 1994,p.10) and deprivation that concerns the nutritional adequacy of food. Taken together, these concepts form a well-rounded perspective on food security that provides an important context for understanding child hunger specifically that is the focus of this paper. Given their dependence on others, children could be deemed the most food insecure part of the population because food shortage, poverty and deprivation are likely to have the harshest effects on them given their vulnerability. In the next section we have provided a brief survey of literature where a link has been traced out between food security and gender inequality. After that we have described in detail about the variables that we have taken, the sources of data from where we have gathered them and the methodology that we have followed to carry out statistical exercises. Then, we have given the results and tried to interpret those so that we can establish the possible association between different measures of child nutritional status and gender inequality. Finally, we have concluded mentioning the determinants which are chiefly responsible for having any possible trend.

Survey of Literature

It is now widely accepted that ‘gender inequality dwells not only outside the household but centrally within it’ [(Agarwal, 2002)]. Gender is found to be an important signifier of differences in interests and preferences, incomes are not necessarily pooled and self interest resides as much within the home as in the market place, with bargaining power affecting the allocation of who gets what and who does what. Not only do intra-household power equations serve to keep women underpowered and subservient but also directly impact on their individual food and nutrition security and indirectly on that of other family members, particularly children. Within the context of household dynamics, food security is related to decisions regarding the responsibility for food production, earning cash income for food purchases, purchasing and preparing food and finally, actual access to food in terms of consumption.

It is often difficult to assess the gender disparity in access to food within the household, as differences in calorie consumption may be attributed to the lower energy needs of women. However, indirect evidence in terms of gender specific malnutrition levels point to existing disparities. A study of eleven villages in Punjab Bose (2003), [Dasgupta (1987)] found that boys and girls had roughly similar calorie intake, girls were given more cereals, while boys are given more milk and fats with their cereal.

No wonder that the incidence of severe malnutrition is greater among girls. Though women devote countless hours doing laborious work related to household food security but at the end of the day that often go unrecognized. Key links have been established between female empowerment in the family, household food security and family welfare. The empowerment of women has a direct impact on the improvement of hunger and the provision of basic needs in education, health, and income and numerous case studies elaborate on these issues. Extending from this, female empowerment is especially important for the lives of the most vulnerable segment of the population – children (UNDP, 2003). Child mortality has been an important focus in the women and development literature. One of the more important areas of interests with regard to child mortality is that of gender bias and the potential preference for male children. Suar (1994) for example notes that gender discrimination begins before birth and spans the entire life of women – the classic “womb to womb” scenario. Such action is gender inequality in its most extreme form and is certainly not the case everywhere in the world (Klasen & Wink, 2003). But, it is a relevant example of the potential consequences of gender inequality for infant and child mortality as well as for access to education and food security that are essential to their quality of life. There are a number of determinants for having malnutrition in the developing countries. Infact we have found some of them in Scanlan’s (2004), Ramachandran’s (2005) and Mehrotra’s (2006) papers. Let us discuss them in a bit detail.Percentage of low birthweight infant is essentially an indicator of the nutritional status of mothers. Small mothers give birth to small babies. Besides, if the weight that mothers are supposed to put on during pregnancy is lower than what is required for the healthy growth of the child then the probability of a new born to be of low birthweight infant becomes high. Baby’s nutritional status is a direct outcome of the mother’s nutritional status.

2. Height of an adult is a direct outcome of several factors including nutrition during childhood and adolescence. Women who are below 140-150 cm might be nutritionally at risk in terms of height-l.b.w.The percentage of women below 145cms is highest for illiterate women and tends to decline with increasing education.

3.The BMI is used to evaluate thinness and obesity. Chronic energy deficiency is indicated by a BMI, which is less than 18.5.While Body Mass Index (BMI) and shortness are indicators of protein-energy malnutrition there is also a micro-nutrient deficiency. Thus, prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia is one indicator of the nutritional status of women. Anaemia may become an underlying cause of maternal mortality rate (MMR) and perinatal mortality. It results in an increased risk of premature delivery and l.b.w. [i) Height ................
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