Power of the Market: Sex Ratio Imbalance and Women Status in India

The missing women issue in Asia has earned more and more concern these years, this paper discovered how does the skewed sex ratio at birth in India since 1980s influence women status by using National Family Health Survey (NFHS) datasets. I use number of birth, children mortality ratio, and conjugal relation variables to represent women status, and also try to find out the changes in circumstances after the "distorted generation" entered into the marriage market by comparing the differences between sons and daughters and between different generations. The results show that, sex ratio imbalance did affect the status of women in marriage, women''s bargaining power inside family does increase with the scarcity of women in the marriage market.