Using four Pakistan Demographic and Health surveys Rashid Javed, Mazhar Mughal and Thierry Lorey find that women married before 18 show stronger son preference and differential fertility stopping patterns. Women’s schooling appears to be the most important channel through which these gender-specific reproductive effects are mediated.
Female early marriage remains widespread in many developing countries. Although global child marriage rates have been declining, the numbers remain high. Worldwide each year, around 12 million girls (about one in five) marry before the age of 18, and more than 650 million women alive today were married as children (UNICEF, 2018). In Pakistan, progress in this respect has been uneven. The Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS 2017–18) shows that 39 percent of women of childbearing age were married before turning 18, down from 50 percent in 1990–91. Despite this improvement, the rate remains far higher than the world average.
Drivers and consequences of early marriage
Early marriage is shaped by deep-rooted social and economic factors. In many communities, younger brides are considered more fertile, more obedient, and easier to control. For parents, marrying daughters early may be seen as a way to reduce household costs, protect family honour, and lower the dowry burden. Such perceptions persist even as education and urbanization are slowly transforming gender norms (Allendorf et al., 2017).
The consequences, however, are severe. Women who marry early tend to have more children, earlier first births, and shorter birth intervals, exposing them to greater health risks (Koski et al., 2017). Their children are more likely to experience poor birth outcomes, such as low birth weight and higher rates of infant or child mortality (Chari et al., 2017). Early marriage can also limit women’s economic empowerment and the education outcomes of their children (Yount et al., 2018).
The sooner, the worse
In a recent study we employed pooled data from four Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys (PDHS; 1990–1991, 2006–2007, 2012–2013, and 2017–2018) to examine whether, and to what extent, the incidence of early marriage shapes married women’s perspectives on reported or revealed gender preferences associated with reproduction (Mughal et al., 2023). In this article, we deal only with the latter and measure them in terms of “likelihood of stopping behaviour”, i.e. the probability that a mother will not have an additional child when she already has n daughters, but no sons. As the likelihood of bearing sons does not depend on age at marriage, or on previous births, we assume that any significant variation in this probability reflects the woman’s desire for sons. This, in turn, depends on a series of covariates (age, age difference with husband, education, employment status, etc.) and early or later marriage, i.e. before or after her 18th birthday, the focus of our research.
Table 1 reports a selection of results for the association between mothers’ early marriage and their child-stopping behaviour in situations where all the existing children are girls. Columns 1 to 8 alternately show results of Probit estimations, with and without controls, and region- and time-fixed effects, for the likelihood of stopping childbearing after the first, second, third and fourth birth respectively.
The parameters for early marriage are negative and statistically significant at all the birth orders. This suggests that young mothers’ desire for at least one son is greater among those who marry young. At the first birth order, for instance, an early-marrying woman with a daughter is 7.7% less likely to stop childbearing than a later-marrying woman, and this (marginal) effect increases to 10.5% after controlling for covariates. This effect increases at higher birth orders, to reach about 12%.
The divergent trend seems to be stronger in the most recent post-2000 cohorts, reflecting increasing social pressures associated with demographic transition. Women’s schooling appears to be the most important channel through which these gender-specific reproductive effects are mediated.
Policy implications
These son-preference norms, which also emerge among early-married men (not discussed here), have non-negligible social and demographic consequences, starting with a worsening of sex ratios at last birth. This may lead to an aggravation of existing gender gaps in children’s anthropometric, health and development outcomes. Tackling these traps requires policy interventions aimed at empowering women. While raising the minimum female marriage age to 18 years could be one option, merely passing laws against child marriage is not sufficient to end the practice in developing countries. It is equally important to provide parents with better incentives, leading to higher school enrolment and labour participation of their daughters. The incidence of female early marriage in Pakistan has decreased over time and the age at first marriage has risen, but this transition owes less to any sustained policy initiative or public awareness campaign and more to socioeconomic pressures related to urbanization, improved girls’ education and increased female participation in the labour market.
Investing in girls’ education remains one of the most effective strategies for reducing gender disparities and delaying marriage. Such investments not only empower young women but also contribute to healthier families and more equitable societies.
References
Allendorf, K., Thornton, A., Mitchell, C., Young-DeMarco, L., & Ghimire, D. J. (2017). Early Women, Late Men: Timing Attitudes and Gender Differences in Marriage. Journal of Marriage and Family, 79(5), 1478–1496. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12426
Chari, A. V., Heath, R., Maertens, A., & Fatima, F. (2017). The causal effect of maternal age at marriage on child wellbeing: Evidence from India. Journal of Development Economics, 127, 42–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2017.02.002
Koski, A., Clark, S., & Nandi, A. (2017). Has Child Marriage Declined in sub-Saharan Africa? An Analysis of Trends in 31 Countries. Population and Development Review, 43(1), 7–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12035
Mughal, M., Javed, R., & Lorey, T. (2023). Female Early Marriage and Son Preference in Pakistan. Journal of Development Studies, 59(10), 1549–1569. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2023.2217997
PDHS. (2018). NIPS. Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017-18.
UNICEF. Child Marriage: Latest trends and future prospects [Internet]. 2018 [cited 2020 Jun 5]. Available from: https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-latest-trends-and-future-prospects/.
Yount, K. M., Crandall, A. A., & Cheong, Y. F. (2018). Women’s Age at First Marriage and Long-Term Economic Empowerment in Egypt. World Development, 102, 124–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.09.013