‘Missing girls’ in interwar Poland: child sex ratios and their correlates across multiple borderlands

Abstract

ABSTRACT Our testing of the relationship between child sex ratios (CSRs) and demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity across nearly 300 districts of interwar Poland around 1931 yields a picture more complicated than common explanations of high masculinization of offspring. In line with existing literature, we found district-level CSRs to be positively associated with the extent of agriculture but negatively related to the relative spread of female employment outside farming and less hierarchical gender and generational household arrangements. At the same time, several of the classical modernization variables (e.g. industrialization, urbanization, female literacy or fertility) either did not result in lower sex ratios or turned out irrelevant. In this article, we attempt to reconcile these diverging results by putting them in the context of the country’s relative backwardness, the specific labor demands created by modernization, and the structure of the agricultural labor market. Altogether, our results add a new stimulus to study gender discrimination in infancy and childhood in East-Central European context and to contemplate universal explanations thereof.