That tired truism about wanting only a healthy baby and not caring about gender? Puh-leeze. Women want daughters, and men crave sons, finds research in the journal Open Anthropology.
The results surprised even the researchers, from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who’d surveyed more than 2,000 students, staff and faculty at the college about gender preference in offspring. They’d assumed that respondents would show little or no preference, but they found that — no matter how they worded the question — there was a “significant offspring gender preference” along gender lines.
Respondents answered the following questions:
1. What gender would you prefer your firstborn child to be (or did you hope for if you already have a child)?
2. If you were to have (or do have) more than one child, would you prefer the majority to be male or female?
3. If you were to have only one child, what gender would you prefer it to be?
“Today, offspring gender preference conflicts with the ongoing mission in many nations, especially in Western Europe and North America, to pursue social and political agendas aimed at eliminating all discrimination on the basis of gender,” write the authors.
And yet, it persists. What gives?
Men’s preference for sons is pretty easy to explain in terms of evolution. Males have a greater chance of perpetuating the family genes by fathering far more children than a woman could ever bear. Women’s preference for daughters is more nuanced. Maybe it’s a maternal desire to have a shared experience of pregnancy, or maybe women are subscribing to visions of perceived mom-daughter emotional bonds. Call it a “legacy drive,” say the authors, and consider that modern women are so infused with pride over their social and financial empowerment that they want to share the good life with their girls. “There is currently a tendency in North American society to place a high degree of emphasis on realizing one’s own ‘success’ through the success of one’s children,” write the authors. “The present data suggest that this opportunity for legacy is envisioned for males generally through sons, but for females generally through daughters.”
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