Receipt of routine preventive care among infant daughters and sons of immigrant mothers in Ontario, Canada: a retrospective cohort study

Objectives — To explore gender disparities in infant routine preventive care across maternal countries of birth (MCOB) and by mother tongue among infants of Indian-born mothers.

Setting — Retrospective population-based administrative cohort in Ontario, Canada (births between 2002 and 2014).

Participants — 350 366 (inclusive) healthy term singletons belonging to families with a minimum of one opposite gender child.

Outcome Measures — Fixed effects conditional logistic regression generated adjusted ORs (aORs) for a daughter being underimmunised and having an inadequate number of well-child visits compared with her brother, stratified by MCOB. Moderation by maternal mother tongue was assessed among children to Indian-born mothers.

Results — Underimmunisation and inadequate well-child visits were common among both boys and girls, ranging from 26.5% to 58.2% (underimmunisation) and 10.5% to 47.8% (inadequate well-child visits). depending on the maternal birthplace. Girls whose mothers were born in India had 1.19 times (95% CI 1.07 to 1.33) the adjusted odds of inadequate well-child visits versus their brothers. This association was only observed among the Punjabi mother tongue subgroup (aOR: 1.26, 95% CI 1.08 to 1.47). In the Hindi mother tongue subgroup, girls had lower odds of underimmunisation than their brothers (aOR: 0.73, 95% CI 0.54 to 0.98).

Conclusions — Gender equity in routine preventive healthcare is mostly achieved among children of immigrants. However, daughters of Indian-born mothers whose mother tongue is Punjabi, appear to be at a disadvantage for well-child visits compared with their brothers. This suggests son preference may persist beyond the family planning stage among some Indian immigrants.