Are girls more malnourished than boys?

One of the main questions we were trying to answer with our research was this: are girls more malnourished than boys? Specifically, before our trip to India we knew that –on average- girls were more underweight than boys. Additionally, we also knew that severe underweight prevalence fell more for boys (by 23.7%) than for girls (by 10.8%). But this was the national average. It wasn’t certain what we would find in Purulia, West Bengal.

What we surprisingly found was that girls weren’t more likely to be stunted (short for their age) or severe wasted than boys. This -for sure- was a surprise because we were doing our research in poor rural villages. Thus, we were expecting to observe a big difference between boys and girls, as in the average poor rural parts of India. But this revelation motivated us to dig deeper to try to find possible explanations for this surprising result.

Our first discovery was that girls weren’t more malnourished than boys because all of them -boys and girls- born stunted! That is, the situation in the villages we visited was worse than what we expected. As you can see in the following graph, the average girl (and boy) in our sample was born shorter than what is expected for babies. But shorter in our case means stunted: more than two standard deviations (Z-scores in the graph) of what should have been the length of the babies, using the World Health Organization standards.

Stunting (height for age) Z-Scores

This led us to our second crucial finding: as opposed to malnourished boys, having malnourished women will translate to a malnutrition trap. Let me explain. First, if girls (and boys) stay stunted after their first two years of life they will be more likely to stay stunted the rest of their lives because the damage done during these initial years is likely to be irremediable. Second, as you can see with our result, stunted mothers are more likely to give birth to stunted children, reinforcing the malnutrition trap. Why this happens? Because shorter mothers are more likely to develop Intrauterine Growth Restriction (IGR): they are not tall enough to have an adequate space to allow their children to grow as they should during pregnancy.

In addition to these findings, it is important to mention a limitation of our research: because we didn’t have enough resources, we didn’t measure all the children in the villages (we only survey a representative –of these villages- random sample). Why I mention this as a limitation? Because research done by Rohini Pande found that birth order matter, especially for girls: “girls born before the family’s eldest son actually fare better than boys born after him, while girls born after the eldest son fare worst of all”. This means that girls are in fact receiving fewer resources for their development than boys, negatively affecting their economic prospects.

No matter the limitations of our research one thing is clear: women are malnourished and this in turn is triggering a malnutrition trap. If we want to solve India’s nutrition problem, women must be at the center of the efforts. Without admitting this fact every policy will fail.