InDepth | O, Boy! Why Son Preference Still Shapes Urban Indian Families

When Radhika’s second daughter was born, the celebrations were followed by a question a mother of two would have least expected: Will you try again? At 35, the schoolteacher already had the family she had planned. The couple wanted two children and they have two daughters now. While they viewed the birth of their second daughter as completing their family, their relatives and acquaintances appeared to believe that something was still missing. “After my second daughter, people would say, ‘You have two girls, why don’t you try once more?’ I doubt anyone would have asked me to try again if the second child had been a boy,” she says. Her own mother, Radhika says, once remarked that it would have been “nice” if one of the children had been a boy.

Neha, 33, who works with a multinational corporation, is a bit aghast. She has one daughter and has not yet decided whether she wants another child. Yet she feels people are casually suggesting to her the gender of her second child. “They say, ‘Next time it will be a boy’, as if they are consoling me… People don’t tell me they don’t value my daughter… But they tell me, ‘One daughter and one son make a complete family’. Who decided what makes my family complete?” asks Neha.

Over the years, Indian women have made enormous gains in education, employment, economic independence and agency, yet some of the oldest expectations around family and lineage have proved harder to dislodge from society. The preference for sons is one of them. Although it may no longer always arrive as a blunt demand in urban settings, it still survives as a suggestion, a consolation or the seemingly innocuous question of whether a couple will “try once more”.

The Outlook-Toluna Survey on motherhood that interviewed 1,334 urban women across India’s metros and tier-1 cities showed that not only does the pressure to have a son still exists, many a time it comes from a direction that is least expected. Among the married women interviewed, two in five (39 per cent) said they faced pressure to have a son. And the pressure came most often from their own parents (34 per cent), followed by parents-in-law (27 per cent) and spouses (26 per cent).

What makes the finding more unsettling is that the pressure does not appear confined to an older generation. In fact, the youngest cohort in the survey reports it most strongly: 53 per cent of married, divorced or separated women aged 18–24 said they had faced pressure to have a son, compared with 46 per cent among those aged 36–45. The gap is striking because it begs the question why societal biases around gender aren’t softening with time, even as women are becoming better educated, more visible in professional life and more assertive about their choices. Another set of numbers in the survey hints that society at large may be falling out of touch with the aspirations of young women. In the survey, the overwhelming reasons for wanting children are personal rather than patriarchal: 58 per cent of women say they want to build a family and 55 per cent cite the joy of parenting. In comparison, only 24 per cent say carrying on the family name or legacy is a reason, while 25 per cent cite partner or family expectations and 16 per cent cultural or religious reasons.

While the pressure to have a son is often rooted in older ideas about inheritance, lineage and carrying the family name forward, those anachronisms appear increasingly disconnected from what women themselves say they want from parenthood.

Inheritance of Loss

For Radhika and Neha, the pressure was from the outside world. But for Sakshi, it has become something more internal. Hailing from a family of three daughters, Sakshi does not want a daughter of her own. The 29-year-old is pursuing a doctorate of philosophy in economics. Yet the idea of being a mother of a girl makes her feel that she will be seen as someone ‘less’.

“I have always felt that my mother was regarded as having a lower social standing because she had three daughters. My parents were happy with us. They never said anything, but socially, we were never enough. This always remained in my mind. I want only a son so that I will not be made to feel that I am lacking something,” she says.

For Sakshi, a son will be a way to get social respect that her own mother could not get. The reasons go beyond what Sakshi experienced. The traditional family structure gives sons a distinct social role. As per government records, some of the reasons for the preference for sons are the belief that it is only the son who can perform the last rites; that lineage and inheritance run through the male line; that sons will look after parents in old age; and that men are breadwinners.

Sakshi’s preference is deeply personal, but it is not an isolated one. National data shows that preference for a son remains embedded in fertility decisions even today.

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019-21, offers a picture of how the preference for a son varies across social groups among women. Overall, in the 15–49 age group, 15.4 per cent said they wanted more sons than daughters, down from 18.8 per cent in NFHS-4, 2015-16. Only three per cent of the women wanted to have more daughters than sons. The preference for sons was higher among rural women (17.4 per cent) than urban women (11.4 per cent). The desire for sons among women declined sharply with education and wealth.

During NFHS-5, the preference for sons is also reflected in women’s desire for additional children, which declines as the number of sons they have increases. At least 65 per cent women with two living daughters and no sons want no more children, compared with 91 per cent with two sons and no daughters. The pattern indicates that “son preference is still an important factor in overall fertility preferences in India”, the report said.

The Supreme Court in June 2026 noted that the distinction between sons and daughters was founded on the stereotype that “a daughter, upon marriage, becomes a member of another family and loses all ties with her natal family”. It stressed that marriage does not extinguish a daughter’s bond with her parents. In the past couple of decades, particularly post-1990s, the situation of women in India has improved significantly. Female literacy has risen sharply and women’s participation in paid work has expanded. Yet, social mores have not kept pace with these changes.

Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research, locates the contradiction in the uneven transformation of the Indian family: “Women’s education, employment and independence have expanded much faster than the institutions governing inheritance, lineage, marriage and caregiving.”

Dowry remains one reason for the aversion towards daughters because the institution has survived across class with remarkable impunity. “Even a daily-wage labourer won’t get married without dowry,” says Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India.

Smaller Family, Higher Stakes

Families in India have become smaller. India’s total fertility rate fell to 2.0 children per woman in NFHS-5, and to 1.6 in urban India. These numbers have not changed much in NFHS-6 either. When couples plan to have only one or two children, there are fewer chances of having the son many families still expect. The Outlook-Toluna Survey also showed that about 97 per cent of mothers surveyed have one or two children.

Princeton economist Seema Jayachandran, who has studied the preference for sons in India, finds that it often centres not on having many boys, but on having at least one son, particularly one who can occupy the traditional position of the eldest male child. “The desire to have at least one son... drives the skewed sex ratio,” she writes, adding that this preference “shows little sign of abating”.

This has grave consequences. It is one of the forces linked to sex-selective abortion and the elimination of female foetuses.

India has had the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act in force since 1996, making sex-determination and selection illegal to prevent gender imbalance and female foeticide. Despite it being illegal, India continues to report cases of sex-determination tests that cost as low as Rs 5,000. Illegal networks selling such tests are regularly busted in various parts of the country. In September 2026, a racket was busted in Rewari, Haryana, where a woman was asked to pay Rs 65,000 for sex determination. In June 2026, another cross-border racket was busted in the national capital region (NCR), where Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 per test was charged and even illegal abortions were facilitated if a female foetus was detected. In 2023, a network was busted by the Bengaluru police, where doctors were charging Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000 for abortion and Rs 5,000 for sex determination.

Listing the reasons for female foeticide and infanticide, the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has said that the small family norm, coupled with the easy availability of sex-determination tests, “may be a catalyst in the declining child sex ratio, further facilitated by easy availability of pre-conception and pre-natal sex selection facilities”.

According to the NFHS-5, women with no sons are more likely than women with one or more sons to have an ultrasound test. The report said that for women with no sons and three daughters who had an ultrasound test, 51 per cent of their pregnancies resulted in the birth of a son and 37 per cent resulted in the birth of a daughter. “The results provide clear evidence of the existence and impact of son preference in India,” the report added. In one of her writings, Sweta Gupta, an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) doctor in NCR, said that when couples explore IVF as a path to parenthood, the most common question is: “Can we choose whether our baby will be a boy or a girl?” IVF clinics, she said, cannot disclose embryo gender, and gender selection for non-medical reasons is a punishable offence.

In addition to the existing PCPNDT Act, the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021, prohibits clinics from offering a child of a predetermined sex and prohibits identifying the sex of an in-vitro embryo.

Yet people still find workarounds. Among the major limitations of these laws is the fact that they only apply in India. In 2019, an illegal “reproductive tourism” and sex-selection racket was busted in Delhi where packages were offered to send families for advanced IVF procedures to foreign destinations, including Thailand, Singapore and Dubai, where choosing the child’s gender was not illegal, promising a male child.

Social Evil

A report by the United Nations Population Fund, “Sex Ratio at Birth in India: Recent Trends and Patterns”, estimates that close to four lakh female births are missed annually in the country because of gender-biased sex selection, equivalent to about three per cent of female births. It adds that the problem is particularly pronounced in northern and western India.

India’s child sex ratio deteriorated across three successive censuses, falling from 945 girls for every 1,000 boys in 1991 to 914 in 2011. A 2011 study published in The Lancet estimated that India had about 4.2 million to 12.1 million selective female abortions between 1980 and 2010. The paradox was that as families began having fewer children, the pressure to ensure at least one son could become more acute.

A daughter was not necessarily the problem; the possibility of completing a family without a son was. The result was that falling fertility did not automatically translate into greater acceptance of daughters. And advances in education and economic development did not, by themselves, dislodge the preference for male children. The Indian Medical Association in 2024 said, “The current PCPNDT Act, after three decades of implementation, has failed to reverse the sex ratio… There cannot be a medical solution to a social evil.”

The fact of the matter is that a standard prenatal ultrasound scan can reveal the sex of a child, but the law can only punish the person who reveals it. There is also no law to prevent people telling a woman that she should have a son. The law can only prosecute a clinic. It cannot prevent a comment. It is, after all, a societal problem.

Nivedita Singh is senior correspondent, Outlook

Fozia Yasin is senior associate editor, Outlook