There is a growing focus on generating evidence on violence against informal women workers across the world.

“Women hold up half the sky”, the Chinese saying goes. But we need to recognize that it is not an equal world for women, globally and in India.

A preference for sons or for more sons than daughters has been documented in several countries in the world.

Every year, as millions of women marry, they dream of starting a family, of having their homes filled with tiny cries and the happy laughter of gurgling babies. In India however, pregnancy is too often followed by the question of
whether the unborn child is a girl or a boy.

This paper discusses contraceptive use and discontinuation among women in north Vietnam, in the context of a strong culture preference for sons and a stringent two-child population policy. Among a random sample of 1432 married women aged 15-49 in a rural province in north Vietnam in l994, nearly