Are Girls The New Boys
Ruth Shalit Barrett’s Elle piece on “gender disappointment” (parents who want to have boys but get girls or vice versa) relies pretty heavily on anecdotes and vague generalizations, but this is at least data-esque and somewhat surprising: “Seventy-one percent of American families who use MicroSort—which is still in clinical trials—want a daughter.” MicroSort being a company that at least claims to be able to help you choose a son or daughter deliberately.
If it’s true that society has developed an aggregate preference for girls that would, of course, be a change from the historic pro-boy bias of the peasant farmer. And as Mickey Kaus jokes “I see profitable arbitrage possibilities for Match.com’s Chinese web service.”
It’s not clear that this MicroSort technology even works, but it seems inevitable that improved understanding of human biology will give parents increasing ability to exercise choice in this regard without resorting to the crude and taboo method of selective abortion. Under the circumstances even a much milder social preference for either boys or girls could have pretty profound social consequences in terms of creating an aggregate gender imbalance. Optimistically, a predominantly female society should have substantially fewer people killed by violent crime and car accidents, and somewhat more enlightened public policy. At the same time, I’ve seen models in which a relatively modest oversupply of women (normally the scenario this is supposed to model is inner-city neighborhoods impacted by the mass incarceration of African-American men) leads to the collapse of norms of monogamy with deleterious consequences for the next generation of children.
55 Responses to “Are Girls The New Boys”
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November 26th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Dude, you totally know how to party on Tgiving!
November 26th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Boys will be boys and girls will be girls some say. But in America, in order to succeed they all have to choose to be men.
Which is to say that capitalism prizes, above all, the aggressive, cutthroat, dog eat dog mentality of the male species.
The nurturing qualities generally attributed to females, while often praised abstractly, will get you no where in, say, the NFL, the military, the boardroom. Or on the campaign trail; or hosting a cable newscast.
If men were more like women there would be so much less violence in the world. Instead, we go in the other direction. We reward women for acting more like men. They must be tougher, less compassionaite, ready to go in for the kill.
Whether they be pirates, CEOs, generals or high government officials, men are leading cause of almost all the world’s bloodiest conflicts.
Personally, I think we should make an all out effort to minimize testosterone across the globe. At one point in human history testosterone was vital in order to assure the literal survival of the species. Now, however, it causes more problems than it solves.
November 26th, 2009 at 10:58 am
For a very reasonable fee, I too will let you choose your next child’s gender. Full refund if I get it wrong! How can you lose?
November 26th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I wouldn’t worry about this too much in the US. I wanted girls, to the point of refusing to select boys’ names. Naturally I have two sons and I’m perfectly happy with it.
The thing to remember about this kind of technology is that it’s going to be very expensive and therefore not generally available. I can’t imagine it’s going to be covered by any form of insurance, either, so only the very wealthy in Europe and North America will use it. There will still be plenty of boys.
In Asia there’s going to be much more of a problem, since the cultural bias favoring boys in India and China is severe enough now to encourage parents to abandon or kill daughters who actually get born. Parents will pay the money to have sons, and with this technology, it’s entirely possible to imagine girls disappearing from those countries. There may be some pathologies from an oversupply of women, but those don’t threaten civil stability. An oversupply of males generally means war and crime skyrocket. Too many men can, therefore, destroy the world.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:06 am
The immediate postwar Soviet society in the nineteen forties and fifties had a majority female population as a result of the massive casaulties that the male population suffered in the Second World War. The Russian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick in her book Tear of those Masks, writes that this led to greater instances of Russian husbands leaving their wives for younger women due to the shortage of men.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Many parents want girls because society does a smooth job of compromising their rights in a milieu whereupon people have to consider other people’s needs. Girls are easier to control, girls are told in various ways to do all kinds of emotional work, so they are often bedrocks of the family, and girls are more likely to take care of their parents in their dotage.
I have about as much of a dim opinion of MicroSort, whose market is really overseas, as I do white transracial adoptions. Not really dim, but subtlely problematic.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:09 am
I’m sorry the correct title of the Fitzpatrick book is Tear off the Masks.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:10 am
There are really no men’s voices in the piece. The only hint that men might be a part of the process is the brief mention that one woman’s husband thought the whole thing was nuts.
So before drawing any wild conclusions about society preferring girls, I think the men need to be polled.
It’s not surprising at all that a new technology involving childbearing would first be seized on by women, who may prefer girls by a larger margin. If the technology becomes more widespread and men become more aware of it, the seventy percent figure might change a bit.
That said, as someone who has struggled for years to start a family with still no success…cry me a river, “gender disappointment” sufferers.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Doesn’t this study suffer from self-selection bias? The only thing this study shows is that men who have daughters are less likely to go on the internet and join support groups, complain, or visit the snake-oil salesman, than women who have only sons.
What we might also be seeing is that women are less willing to enjoy an all-boy family than men are to enjoy an all-girl family.
Finally, the natural birth rate of boys to girls is 1.05 to 1. So that might have some effect on this as well.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:24 am
“…the historic pro-boy bias of the peasant farmer…”
I’m not sure this holds true in general. As detailed in Matt Ridley’s “The Red Queen”, in polygamous societies, poor families tend to prize girls more, while royalty and the upper classes favor boys.
This is explicable in terms of reproductive strategies. A poor man would have very few prospects of marrying well or at all, but a poor woman could still become one of many wives of an aristocrat. Conversely, a wealthy girl isn’t likely (or able) to have many more children than a poor one. So the best way for a wealthy family to “leverage” its social and financial advantage is by favoring boys, who could beget tons of offspring through wives or mistresses.
Pop evolutionary psychology – just one more thing to be thankful for.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:24 am
you need not be suspicious of sperm sorting on the basis of X/Y chromosomes – the cattle industry has been successfully doing in on a large scale for a while.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:32 am
We wanted a girl, but after infertility, we were happy with a baby. Any baby. And honestly, the gender of the baby we got was of minuscule importance to the baby itself. Mainstreet, if that’s where you’re at, too, my sympathies. I wish you luck.
While I understand the cultural need for Indians and Chinese to have boys, isn’t there something to be said that both of these examples are in highly populace countries with severe growth pressures? In another time, or with less pressure, I can see this problem going away, or being reduced to talk show status. Anecdotally, the Chinese and Indians I know here in the States show no preference for boys or girls. And yes, I know they’re more educated than their counterparts on the Asian continent, but doesn’t that just prove the point further: less pressure and less poverty seem to background this problem.
I wish I’d saved the citation (Broadsheet, perhaps) but it seems that in South Korea the gender selection preference was for female children (among couples going through infertility and offered to have their sperm spun around in a centrifuge).
November 26th, 2009 at 11:37 am
George walton looses the internet.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Also, Roissy bait.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:39 am
An oversupply of males generally means war and crime skyrocket.
I don’t know about that, but an oversupply of men is a pretty good population control.
November 26th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Well yes, in many settings woman already seem to be the privileged ones when one looks at people under 30. In others, its still a very male favouring world. But its kind of hard to push back against that when woman are still at the disadvantaged position by large in society.
November 26th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I would try to have just hermaphrodites – best of both worlds!
November 26th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
More women for me. It is Thanksgiving!
November 26th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Is Ruth Shalit Barrett the same person as Ruth Shalit, who was dismissed from The New Republic and, later, Salon, for numerous factual inaccuracies in her articles?
November 26th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I read that article a month or two ago. I have two boys, and I will admit that my original preference was for a girl (it went away as soon as my first son was born and never returned.) Most of my female friends and acquaintances have also voiced this preference. I don’t think there’s much more to it than the feeling that they’ll be able to have a closer, richer relationship with a same-gender child over her lifetime. There’s also a widespread belief that girl babies are “easier” (i.e. less fussy, easier to deal with).
Of course, the factor that came out in the Elle article was that having a female baby leads to a more satisfying consumer experience for the mother, as there is a wider selection of clothing, gender-specific nursery decorating themes, etc, for girls. Seriously–when I told one of my friends that I was having a boy, her reaction was: “Oh–well, you’ll save so much money on clothes!”
November 26th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Actually, certain inflatable dolls are the next girls.
But let’s not get into that, please?
November 26th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
What’s there to worry about? The market will take care of this. As the supply of females relative to males rises, the desirability of males will increase and the pendulum will swing backwards. Of course it kinda suck for everyone who lives through the chaos along the way, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs…
it strikes me that this is a very good example for teaching purposes as to precisely the STUPIDITY of the market fundamentalist types who claim that every problem on earth can be solved through price signals or their social equivalents.
In the first place it’s an issue everyone can appreciate — we can all picture the social misery that can arise from a gender unbalanced society, no matter which way the unbalance occurs.
In the second place it makes the time horizons clear — even if market signals do work in a generation or so, what about the people who have already been born? (Substitute power plants for markets if you don’t see the obvious generalized issue.)
In the third place there are the issues of externalities. In this case, it’s the parents who get all the satisfaction whatever that may be from their choice of gender for the kid; it’s the kid (and the rest of society) who have to live with the consequences.
In the fourth place there are the informational issues. h Economicus learns ALL relevant information before making his choices. How many parents know the fraction of their kids cohort that will be female? How many know and engage in some sort of magical thinking that it doesn’t matter because everyone else will change their minds?
And they are making one of the most important decisions of their lives.
I am quite serious here. I think this example should become the poster child for why vastly more sections of the economy should be more regulated — because the world simply does not operate according to the laws and timescales of market fundamentalists.
November 26th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
There are all sorts of unplaeasant cultural trends that might be showing themselves here. The first is that, fifty years into the feminist revolution, people still stubbornly refuse to evaluate boys and girls as nuturable human beings, instead taking the lazy rout of blaming what
It also suggests that people are evaluating offspring as toys to played with, not as family members to be nurtured and befriended to adult-hood. Chinese families want boys because they potentially contribute more physical labor to the familiy. I suspect that, giving the cultural “princess syndrome” in America, girls are favored underneath the rationalization because they are cute and harmless. Of course, for the first two centuries of our history, Americans were expected to their sons as civilized, productive gentlemen. It’s only the last generation that insists that male offspring are little animals who will always be trouble and reject education and basic training in manners and morality.
November 26th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Correction: “. . . instead taking the lazy rout of blaming whatever goes wrong on genetics.”
November 26th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I would argue that the example drawn from urban gender imbalances due to imprisonment is not applicable to what would happen with a more general societal imbalance. The urban imbalances exist within an otherwise patriarchal polity that does not prioritize the policies necessary to promote success in a non-nuclear family. However, if the imbalance was societal, that would change the polity so that it would promote wholly different and more nurturing policies that would likely lead to different outcomes than those seen in urban cores.
November 26th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Maybe it’s simply because the company claims to be really good at guaranteeing girls and not so good with boys.
Study data so far indicate that for patients sorting sperm for a girl baby, approximately 9 out of 10* of those who became pregnant were successful in conceiving a female baby; for those sorting for a boy baby, approximately 3 out of 4* who became pregnant were successful in conceiving a male baby.
http://www.microsort.net/
November 26th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I dunno about “enlightened social policy.” Someone correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t Western Europe see huge gender inequities after The Great War, and the Soviet Union experience the same after WWII? I don’t see a lot of enlightened social policy coming out of those era. I guess you can point to the 20’s as the beginning of social safety nets in gov’t policy, but you also have the rise of Bolshevism, Facsism, Stalin and the modern authoritarian state, the beginning of American nannying Evangelicism (resulting in the banning of the sale and importation of alcohol) . . .
November 26th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Yes, females take fewer risks and the above outcomes would be beneficial. Pessimistically, a predominantly female society would lead to less innovation i.e., fewer life saving drugs, fewer energy efficiency gains, reduced information systems advances, etc., etc., etc. Everything that harms society would be reduced, but everything that advances society would be reduced too.
It’s the risk/reward continuum. In general, men take more risks, fail more often, but as a result attain higher rewards. The reverse is true for women. It’s hardwired.
Be careful for what you wish for.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
People who use gender selection for a valid medical reason- avoiding X-linked diseases that disproportionately affect males, such as hemophilia- would be selecting for girls. At this point, I think that comprises a significant percentage of the people who use MicroSort, as opposed to people who just want a kid of a certain gender for family balance/preference reasons.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
As DJ says above, the Microsort technology is much better at sorting for a girl. I’m not sure I’m plunking down $10K for a 3/4 shot at a boy, but 9/10 for a girl? Yeah. Microsort clients are not a particularly valid gauge of gender preference among the general public.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
True, but there’s the “niggling” factors like post-war trauma on these societies and the like. As far as I can tell, the human race has never seen a society that peacefully transitioned into a significant female-majority, so we have no idea of what it would entail.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
“Optimistically, a predominantly female society should have substantially fewer people killed by violent crime and car accidents, and somewhat more enlightened public policy. At the same time, I’ve seen models in which a relatively modest oversupply of women (normally the scenario this is supposed to model is inner-city neighborhoods impacted by the mass incarceration of African-American men) leads to the collapse of norms of monogamy with deleterious consequences for the next generation of children.”
The latter is always true. And it’s not just inner cities. Most Asian societies have too many women because men’s jobs are much more dangerous. Think I’m kidding? You spend sixteen hours a day cranked up on meth walking twenty stories in the air on bamboo scaffolding and see how long you last. Even the prostitutes have a safer life. They literally need to export young women, and they do it. And every taxi driver in Bangkok will tell you it’s actually a conscious policy. It may not be intentional, but the Thai do know it’s necessary, so they don’t do anything to slow down the exportation of women.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Both @29 and @30 make very good points in terms of extracting any sort of meaningful conclusions from this data, but speaking as a parent who was interested in the sex of the child only insofar as he wanted to be prepared for post-birth niceties, girls seem to be far more expensive than boys to raise (which seems to be true for all of my admittedly self-selected circle.) I don’t know how much this fact would factor into the sex of a child, but it is there as a monetary incentive.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Maynard: What’s there to worry about? The market will take care of this.
You sound like the kids in my freshman class who, after reading Ayn Rand in high school and then taking Econ 101 their first semester in college, went around saying that they weren’t really worried about racial discrimination because such behavior was uneconomical and the market would do away with it.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Well Jason, now you tell me why the market does not take care of discrimination. Frankly, i dont understand it.
PS: Maybe you should have read all of maynards post.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
What I don’t get is why anyone would chose a girl over a boy. You probably will have to go down to the police station and bail your teenage son out, but at least you aren’t going to the maternity ward. The latter costs a lot more.
“What’s there to worry about? The market will take care of this.”
Yes it will. But not through your bullshit Econ 101 crap. Want to know how the market really does it? Human trafficking and sexual slavery. They really need to start teaching the economics of black markets in college so people don’t come out of college thinking they know the real world.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
“Well Jason, now you tell me why the market does not take care of discrimination.”
The market does take care of discrimination. We even have a name for the market mechanism: slavery.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
There’s one thing they never teach you in economics. If there are excess human beings, the humans cease to become actors in the market and instead become commodities. And let’s face it, a teenage girl at least has sexual value. A teenage boy better work hard or he’s going to be sold as body parts. A good liver is 50K, and his kidneys are 20K a pop.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Christ, jason L and fostert. OK, you are both too stupid to recognize sarcasm. But is it too much to ask that you read to the FREAKING SECOND PARAGRAPH of my post to see my point? Heck, read to the bloody third sentence — would that really have been so hard?
November 26th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
The San Jose Mercury News has published at least one story about pro-male gender bias amongst Asian-American communities based on live birth statistics. Among Indian families in Santa Clara county, those who had 2 daughters followed by another child had a 58% chance of having a boy.
Just a data point.
November 26th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Re: Well Jason, now you tell me why the market does not take care of discrimination. Frankly, i dont understand it.
Discrimination can be a “good” that people purchase like any other. If enough people desire to purchase it (through the “payment” of decreased economic efficiency) then you will have a discrminatory society, and there will not be enough demand for non-discriminatory goods and services to support those few who seek to go against popular preference.
November 26th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
If there were substantially more boys than girls in the US I would only have girls.
If there were more girls than boys I would only have boys.
You want your kids to be whatever is in short supply so they are sought after.
In societies like China or India this is overridden because the son is expected to take care of his parents and the daughter is not. Parents therefore put their own interests ahead of those of their children.
This does not apply in the US.
November 26th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Maynard: Christ, jason L and fostert. OK, you are both too stupid to recognize sarcasm.
Since I didn’t read beyond the first paragraph, the appropriate charge to level against me is laziness and carelessness rather than stupidity. After reading the rest of your post, looks like I agree with you.
November 27th, 2009 at 12:17 am
We just found out last Friday our first baby will be a girl. We weren’t rooting for one or the other… just a healthy baby.
November 27th, 2009 at 12:50 am
For the indecisive there are always birls, and goys.
The turducken was delicious.
November 27th, 2009 at 6:42 am
So matt, your worry here is reduced to “think of the children, wont somebody PLEASE think of the children!”.
Weak sauce imho.
To quote the sages of surf:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYY2I_YUyYc
November 27th, 2009 at 7:28 am
I’m afraid I can’t muster up any sympathy for people who are blessed with children but don’t appreciate it because they’re the wrong gender. My dad wanted a boy and my sister was born. He had so much fun with her that he hoped his second child would be another girl, and I was born. He thought it was hilarious.
The same thing happened to me in reverse: for my first kid I wanted a girl because little girls are so adorable. I got a son. I’ve enjoyed him so much that I was hoping for another boy, and my wife is seven months along with a girl. My wife, who grew up with sisters, was hoping for a tribe of boys and no girls. We’re both ecstatic about having a girl.
November 27th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Gee, I never realised that the hipsters were bothered by ‘the collapse of the norms of monogamy’ and deleterious impacts on children. You generally tend to hear them babbling about how monogamy is restrictive and casual promiscuous intercourse is the solution. I would also suggest that said collapse of monogamy in modern America has as much to do with the passage of Roe v. Wade, as the eminent George Akerlof has pointed out, as it does with mass incarceration.
November 27th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
According to Ruth Shalit, plagiarists are the new journalists.
No wonder Mickey Kaus is pimping this article (and the link to his Free Republic pals).
The piece relies on anecdotes and generalizations because they’re the easiest to manufacture.
November 27th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Handley may have been sarcastic, but I like his first sarcastic paragraph more than the rest of his post. Here we have a news article about a trend which isn’t very widespread, but which we can speculated could lead to hypothetical problems if it became widespread enough, and his response seems to be that freedom of choice is bad (in the scenario described in the article, and other circumstance too) and the government should control everything (or at least “vastly more”).
November 27th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Well from a biological standpoint more girls is a much better situation than more boys. Better chances of keeping the species going when the bacon flu takes us all….
November 28th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
“I’ve seen models in which a relatively modest oversupply of women (normally the scenario this is supposed to model is inner-city neighborhoods impacted by the mass incarceration of African-American men) leads to the collapse of norms of monogamy with deleterious consequences for the next generation of children.”
Yeah, like in Russia after WWII.
Oh, wait, that didn’t really happen.
November 28th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
The collapse of paternal investment among African-Americans, which was always low, began with the increse in welfare payments to single mothers in the 1960s. Incarceration actually fell in the 1960s despite the rise in crime.
November 28th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Mr. Steve Sailor’s statement at #53 is, of course, as usual a tissue of vile and damnable lies. The increase of illegitimacy among African Americans in the inner city has nothing to do with the welfare state, and nothing to do with African culture or other race-mongering arguments. It has everything to do with the pernicious legacy of Roe v. Wade, which enabled unprincipled young men to use women for sex without agreeing to marry them in the event of a pregnancy. The estimable George Akerlof has shown this, and annyone who continues to peddle the B.S. about welfare payments is nothing but a race-mongering yahoo in the mode of Sailor.
November 29th, 2009 at 3:30 am
That’s not in the least true. Some of the people here seem to be confused and thinking that it’s some sort of high-tech genetic engineering or something. In fact, it’s fairly simple and relies upon the fact that the X chromosome contains more DNA than the Y chromosome does.
From the Wikipedia entry on “sperm sorting“:
It had previously been theorized (and widely reported) that the X and Y sperm would have a different size and shape, and perhaps speed, and could be sorted that way. Recent research indicates that this isn’t true. Nevertheless, there is more DNA in an X sperm than in a Y sperm, and the above method utilizes this. It’s not as simple as the Ericcson Method, which relies upon the theory that Y sperm are faster (and, the theory not being true, the Ericcson Method doesn’t work), but it’s still pretty simple. And if demand were high enough, it could scale easily into something quite inexpensive.
I find a lot of the above attributed psychology of motivations for sex selection to range from almost randomly ad hoc to offensive. I’ve no children, but have always much preferred to have a girl over a boy, just because I like and am more comfortable with girls (having only a much younger sister). Other people will have different reasons. I find the assumption that individuals will naturally and necessarily want same-sex (as themselves) children to be absurd and annoying.
Also, I have my doubts as to whether a modern technological society with (comparatively) sex equity would produce a significant imbalance in sex, given the ubiquitous choice. As someone writes above, the fact that MicroSort is much more effective for choosing female children than male entirely invalidates any conclusions that because more parents are choosing it for selecting girls indicates that generally parents in the US currently prefer girls. People who choose MicroSort will naturally prefer the sex that the service is most effective at producing—especially if it’s a big difference (and 90% versus 75% is pretty big).