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International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes pp 153–165Cite as

When the Wages of Sin Is Death: Sexual Stigma and Infant Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Population ((IHOP,volume 8))

Abstract

Over the past three decades, population scholars have become interested in gender bias, women’s autonomy, and gender equity. This work has significantly expanded our understanding of population processes and dynamics, and productively focused our attention on some of the ways in which gender matters for demographic outcomes. Building on these approaches, this chapter examines the consequences of one aspect of gender systems—namely the social control of female premarital sexuality—on child survival. I find that women’s conformity to gendered norms concerning premarital sex affects the survival of their children in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although Goody (1990) has proposed that systems of descent and inheritance, horticultural practices, marriage payments, and the cultural value placed on bridal virginity are all closely interrelated, the exceptions to his classificatory scheme are nearly as numerous as the cases that fit, and particularly patterns of sexual stigma frequently fail to conform to the predictions of his model.

  2. 2.

    The main results are not sensitive to the details of this formalisation. If we reclassify births to women married in the first 2 months of gestation or babies whose parents married within the first 2 months post-partum as “bridal pregnancy” the results do not substantively change.

  3. 3.

    This still means that data are missing for 40% of the individuals. This group includes individuals in very small ethnic groups—for which there is just less chance of relevant ethnography having been done—as well as those who live in ethnic groups on which the data are ambiguous. This latter group is more of a problem, because its exclusion from the analysis means that we are using the more extreme cases to measure differences. Including the ambiguous cases would make the differences smaller and noisier.

  4. 4.

    Leaving out the country dummies makes the association of stigma with mortality appear considerably larger. Not using weights or not clustering errors has no substantive effect on the results.

  5. 5.

    While p < 0.05 is often taken as a robust measure of significance, with such a large sample, it should be viewed with some suspicion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Demography and Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Jennifer Johnson-Hanks

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  1. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks
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Correspondence to Jennifer Johnson-Hanks .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, USA

    Nancy E. Riley

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

    Jan Brunson

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Johnson-Hanks, J. (2018). When the Wages of Sin Is Death: Sexual Stigma and Infant Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Riley, N., Brunson, J. (eds) International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes. International Handbooks of Population, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1290-1_11

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