Could sex of babies at birth be linked to female wage employment?

My research at STIAS uses a publicly available household data to explore the association between sex at birth and a mother’s wage employment status. A recent Kenyan study (Mwabu et al., 2025) reports a large, significant negative association between fertility and female wage employment, with the drop in the number of male births, being substantially greater than for female births. Although the difference between numbers of male and female births is statistically insignificant, the gap has strong support in biomedical literature. My work at STIAS, will re-examine the same relationship, using the same dataset, but with the association parameters being estimated over the entire distribution of births, rather than at the mean. I plan to extend the analysis to other African countries, starting with Southern African region. The proposed work is feasible because at STIAS, I will have unparalleled Space for the Mind and an opportunity for collaboration. After STIAS, I will finalize my research for joint publications with colleagues at the Institute and the University.