Is there a gender gap in child nutritional outcomes in rural China?

•We model gender differences in anthropometric outcomes among rural Chinese children.•We investigate if there are differences between girls from one-child and non-one-child households.•We show that girls from non-one child households have adverse nutritional outcomes.

In this paper, we use data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) to examine if there are any gender differences in child anthropometric outcomes among rural Chinese children, explicitly taking into account the role of China's family planning policies. Our analysis shows that although there have been improvements in the child anthropometric measures height-for-age and weight-for-age over the last two decades, children, particularly girls from non-one child households have adverse nutritional outcomes. These gender differences persist in two-child households, where boys have better height-for-age outcomes when their sibling is a male rather than a female. Our decomposition model finds that there is a large unexplained component, which may be attributed to gender discrimination against the girl child.