Do People Really Prefer Boys Over Girls?

Nature has seen fit to produce a gender balance of about 105 males for every 100 females. There may be some good reasons for this slight imbalance since men, the weaker sex in terms of longevity, die off sooner. So there is a slight “natural” bias in favor of more males – at least at the outset of life – but what about the “unnatural” biases at work in the world? It is true that in some poor and emerging countries, where male labor is still highly useful for basic survival, a premium is placed on male offspring. In some places, abortion of unwanted genders and even infanticide have carried over into the present day. But social and economic trends ultimately defeat these biases. The governments of both China and India, for example, have now made it illegal to use abortion as a sex-selecting methodology and campaign actively to create more gender-balanced populations. As those economies improve – and they have improved enormously in recent years – government efforts are paying off.

In the West, recent surveys show that some populations favor females over males, quite the opposite of what we have been told to expect. But, overall, the trends are running strongly in favor of balanced families consisting of an equal number of boys and girls, usually one of each. Recently German bioethicist Edgar Dahl of the University of Giessen, addressing the Royal Society in London at an international conference on assisted human reproduction, cited studies showing that in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, all countries where sex-selection technologies and methodologies are more readily available than in most other parts of the world, there is no notable gender preference overall.

It is true that there is some preference that the firstborn be a male. This preference is actually higher in the United States than in most European countries. Professor Dahl cited data showing that about twice as many Americans prefer that their firstborn be a boy rather than a girl. But then, like their European counterparts, they want their second child to be of the opposite sex. Thus, in the West, Professor Dahl concludes, “There is no evidence at all that there is a threat to the sex ratio.”

In a most recent survey of those using the Shettles method, researchers have found that those who notified them in advance of their intentions to try for either a boy or a girl were evenly divided in preference between boys and girls. Moreover, in almost every case, those wanting a boy already had one or more daughters, and vice versa. In those cases where couples stated they were using sex selection during their first efforts to conceive, we did find a slight preference for male offspring as firstborns.