Shifting Gendered Social Norms: Impact of a Mass Media Campaign on Child Health in India

Abstract Exposure to media has been successful in shifting gender norms in many developing countries. In this paper, we study the impact of a government-led media intervention on the probability of the birth of a daughter and the gender gap in early life health outcomes. The intervention, implemented in India between 2015 and 2018, included a mass media campaign designed to increase the perception of the value of a female child, while also tightening the policing of illegal sex-selective abortions. We exploit variation in the timing of exposure to the programme across Indian districts as well as quasi-exogenous variation in the sex of the firstborn child to identify the impact of the programme and find that it led to an increased proportion of female births as well as a reduction in the gender gap in mortality in intensively treated families. The mechanism that explains our results is a relative increase in health investments in daughters, such as breastfeeding and vaccinations. Our results have important policy implications: they emphasise the importance of demand-side measures to change people’s preferences for daughters rather than just imposing top-down, supply-side bans on discriminatory behaviour, which can lead to increased gender discrimination on alternative margins.