Gender Biased Fertility and Children Treatment: evidence from Kyrgyzstan since over the second half of the XX century

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union conducted a unique "social experiment" on women's emancipation in the soviet Central Asian Republics. In this paper, exploiting the number of younger siblings approach, I show that those policies could not eradicate son preference in Kyrgyzstan. Although the quantitative aspect of son preference was persistent there, Soviet Union could achieve the neutralization of the qualitative aspect of son preference. Using the vaccination dimension of treatment for children, I provide evidence of the absence of gender-differential treatment of children in Kyrgyzstan.