The paper explores the relative roles of men’s and women’s sex composition preferences for women’s desire to stop childbearing in developing countries. The analysis covers 45 countries, using Demographic and Health Survey couples datasets from the years 2010 to 2021. Probabilities of women’s desire to stop childbearing are considered when the sex composition of children matches the ideals of both the woman and her partner, of the woman or her partner only, and of neither of them. Models with country fixed effects are estimated for two pooled samples, one including couples from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where sex composition of children is rarely linked to fertility, and the other one including couples from all other regions. The analysis has shown that in case men and women disagreed on whether current sex composition of children matched their ideals, women’s unmatched preferences were more strongly related to their desires to have one more child, both in and outside SSA. In the non-SSA countries, agreement of both spouses in their dissatisfaction with sex composition of children additionally raised the probability of women’s desire for the next child. However, men’s unmatched fertility preferences played no role in women’s fertility desires in SSA. Both the priority of women’s sex composition ideal for children and the importance of agreement between spouses are not expected in the context of family patriarchy. The results suggest that developing countries are not in a sharp contrast on roles of men and women in taking fertility decisions, at least in what concerns sex composition of children.

This paper studies the role of gender preferences for children in formation of desires for the next child in nine countries of the Middle East and North Africa, South and Central Asia, the Caucasus and Balkans. For all countries selected for the study, effects of son preference have been detected in actual fertility during recent decades, but gender preferences in desires for the next child have been studied much less systematically. Using Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in these countries in 2010–2021, desires to stop fertility and to have a child within 2 years are considered separately for women with one and two living children. For women with one living child, the gender of that child has a significant effect on these desires only in South-Asian countries, where women who only have a daughter are more likely to want to have another child within 2 years and less likely to want to stop childbearing compared to women who only have a son. For women with two living children, in most of the considered countries, the desire to have another child within 2 years only shows a preference for having at least one son, whereas the desire to stop fertility shows effects of balanced gender preference in six out of the nine countries. The preference for a balanced gender composition of children observed for the desire to stop fertility actualizes the question of whether a son preference will remain unchallenged in actual fertility in these countries in the near future. In the final section, possible social correlates of son preference and balanced gender preference are discussed on the example of two countries, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The paper studies cross-cohort changes of son preference effects upon parity progressions. In many countries of South Asia, Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa women are more likely to have another child when they do not have a living son. However, little is known about how son preference in parity progressions changes over time or across birth cohorts of women in those countries. Understanding these changes if crucial, as son preference in parity progressions contributes to higher fertility rates and reinforces gender inequalities within families. The paper concentrates on son preference in progressions to the third child across 1950-89 birth cohorts of women in eight countries of the studied regions. Birth histories from World Fertility Surveys and Demographic and Health Surveys are analyzed using event history techniques. Results show that the importance of not having a son increased in more recent cohorts at the same time that overall third birth transition rates declined. Having no daughter was not associated with higher progression risk in any of the cohorts. Son preference therefore persists and has even increased despite social changes that may be expected to balance the value of sons and daughters, such as urbanization and growth of women educational levels. Son preference in parity progressions appears to be generally more stable than sex-selective abortions, another manifestation of higher value of sons, likely because the societal consequences of sex-selective abortions are more visible and widely recognized.