Sophie Morris explores the shift in preference from male to female babies as mothers opt for sex-selective IVF and technological advances inch towards widespread access to gender-testing at home
I kept my secret for the long and broadly enjoyable nine months of my pregnancy. But as soon as my daughter was born, I could let it out. Thank God it’s a girl!
My husband and I decided not to find out the sex of our unborn child at the 20-week scan, as many parents do. It’s our first, we said. Let it be a glorious surprise. But when it came to thinking of baby names, I could only think of ideas for girls. Scores of options emerged while, curiously, I had only one name for a baby boy.
I guess I couldn’t imagine having one. Although my husband has two brothers, I have two sisters and between us we have five daughters and a son, which means that girls outnumber boys 9:5 across three generations or 8:4 across two.
None of us has ever owned a male pet, and when my dad raised the issue of getting a dog with balls last year, we all objected. In that instance, we were overruled by the patriarchy.
Girl preference Once I had a baby girl in my arms, I felt able to admit it had always been my preference. But this scenario is wildly different to one population forecasters say may well emerge in the near future, in which new parents are cuddling baby girls not by happy coincidence, but thanks to sex-selective IVF.
Already legal in the US, Mexico and the UAE, if it becomes the norm, it will contribute to a demographic shift happening across the globe. After centuries of male domination, the past two decades reveal an extremely sharp rise in the number of baby girls born each year, closing a large gender gap that has historically favoured boys.
Last week, The Economist reported that in 2000 there were 1.6 million “missing” girls from the global population due to infanticide and abortion. This year, it’s 200,000 and falling. The magazine posed the radical question of what the world might look like if the imbalance were flipped. Would it be better or worse? The short answer: “It would not be as bad as too many men.”
Nathalie Renders, 45, is bringing up three boys aged between five and 12 in Dubai with her husband, though they are from the UK. She didn’t think about gender when pregnant with her first two, she says, as the focus was on having healthy babies. By the time she had her third, they did find out he was going to be a boy, but only out of practicality - to check she had the right clothes. “I wasn’t the kind of mum who wanted to dress a girl up,” she says.
They moved back to the UK for a year when her first two boys were young. “What struck me was the difference in how I felt being a parent back in the UK with boy children. I was getting more concerned for their safety as they grew up. In particular around knife crime.”
The family moved back to Dubai, where sex-selective IVF is legal. “I do know people who have gone down that route after having two or three of one gender and wanting something different,” Renders says. “Sometimes it’s worked, and sometimes it hasn’t.”
“If I get comments of, ‘Oh, three boys! You’ll need to try for a girl,’ it typically comes from people from Asian countries. When I ask why, they might say, so there’s someone to look after you, or someone you can teach to cook. Occasionally people say ‘Surely you want another female in the house?’ But me and the cat are super happy.”
Sperm-sorting, as it’s colloquially known, is only available to a very small proportion of rich prospective parents, just like ultrasounds 50 years ago. But as soon as scans became cheap and commonplace, families all over the world, especially in cultures where girls were seen as a burden, began to abort female foetuses. Technological advances suggest that women could soon be able to buy kits that test their blood for gender weeks into a pregnancy.
In previous centuries, boys have been viewed as the breadwinners, and as simply “better” than girls. In countries where culture and religion further undermine the value of women, misogyny has led to devastating trends for the murder and abortion of females. But these countries, in particular large Asian nations such as China, India and South Korea, have been stealthily dropping their desire for boy babies.
Meanwhile, girl preference is booming all over the developed world, from the sperm-sorting North Americans to emerging evidence suggesting that girls are first choice in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Portugal. In Finland, this was detected by statistics showing that families who have a girl first are likely to have fewer children overall. If the first-born is a boy, they keep trying. In the US, adoptive parents will pay up to $16,000 (£12,000) more for a girl, according to a 2010 study by a team of economists from the London School of Economics, the California Institute of Technology and New York University.
Natural order More men are born naturally, with a global ratio of around 105 boys to every 100 girls. This ratio remains unchanged in the UK. As boys are marginally more likely to die young, there should be roughly the same number of men and women when they reach reproductive age.
But this ratio skewed further in the late 20th century. In China, where the one-child law disadvantaged girls, there was a high of 117.8 boys to every 100 girls born in 2006. In India, the ratio was 109.6 in 2010. In South Korea in 1990, it was 115.7. Today these disparities have shrunk to 109.8 in China and 106.8 in India. In South Korea it is back to normal.
A friend in China who is in her early forties tells me that she doubts anyone in her generation would still think a boy is preferable. She grew up in London, but asks a colleague in his thirties who grew up in China, for his opinion. “Among those of my generation, no one prefers boys,” he says. “The one above us, yes, but not those of my age. In fact, many of us prefer girls.”
Money remains an issue. “For a boy, you have to buy a property for him to start a family, whereas for a girl you don’t have to,” he explains. “At the end of the day, you give her away. Girls study harder, they sit still, they’re easier to manage.”
These sentiments echo comments I hear from British families, where girls are seen as being quieter, docile and happy to sit for hours colouring instead of destroying the garden.
A 2024 study from Cambridge University Press and Assessment found that this perspective plays out in school, where girls in the UK outperform boys from primary to university.
But there’s more to it than achievement. It’s widely believed girls stay closer, emotionally and geographically, to their families and will provide support and care later on in life, though I don’t live near my parents and wouldn’t expect my daughter to remain close, either.
Perhaps my own desire for a girl was unimaginative, I simply couldn’t imagine bringing up a boy. It turns out that she does love to sit and draw for hours, but she only wears shorts and T-shirts and laughs at me when I put on make-up.
Are girls “easier”? Be careful what you wish for. At nine years old, mine has perfected a withering look that could turn men to stone. A 2021 study published in the Economic Journal found that parents of teenage girls are more likely to get divorced, with an increased risk of 9 per cent when the first-born daughter is 15.
Gender disappointment A much stronger sentiment than that of preferring, secretly or otherwise, boys or girls, is active regret over giving birth to the “wrong” sex. In countries like the US, where “gender reveal” parties have become popular, the fallout is “gender disappointment” clips on social media, in which couples, who have gathered their nearest and dearest to reveal the results of an ultrasound scan, get a nasty surprise and cannot hide their devastation at the prospect of becoming a #boymom.
One Mumsnet user writes that she feels “embarrassed, stressed, upset and really anxious” about the gender disappointment she experienced during pregnancy. “I’ve had points where I feel like I’d rather not be pregnant than have a boy - and I don’t know why I feel like this.”
Another mother says she is devastated to be pregnant with her third boy “ because I will never raise a child with the shared experience of being female.”
Someone else asks why, among so many threads on gender disappointment, no one is ever disappointed to be having a girl. A contributing factor is that most of those writing on Mumsnet are female themselves.
A 2004 study published by the US National Bureau for Economic Research, based on data from 1940 to 2000, found that boy preference was largely driven by fathers. And men who find out their partner was carrying a boy were more likely to marry before the birth.
The trouble with boys Recent debates about toxic masculinity and violence against women and girls have not been helpful to the male reputation.
It’s a universal trend, but in the UK specifically there is a much-discussed fear about the lost future of generations of boys who have been taught they are innately bad.
There is no gender gap in terms of population imbalance in the UK, yet we are all quaking at the chilling story depicted in recent Netflix drama Adolescence, in which a young teenager fatally stabs a teenage girl because, it transpires, she was taunting his manhood.
But men still dominate in boardrooms, politics and religion. They still earn far more at the box office and in all professional sports. They are still taken more seriously everywhere from hospitals to internet service provider helplines.
Male rage A lack of female partners has led to the phenomenon of angry single men, their fury fanned by influencers like Andrew Tate, who has convinced potentially millions of men worldwide that women are disposable belongings. He is hugely popular, and YouTube reportedly still profits from his content, despite a ban.
In China, single men are known as “bare branches”. In the West, they’re called incels - involuntarily celibate. Everywhere, sexually frustrated single men appear to blame more than their lack of a decent shag on women. Studies have linked the gender gap to increased rape and violent crime. Of the 145 mass shootings in the US between 1982 and December, just four were carried out by women and two by mixed-sex attackers.
On a global level, I’m all for more girls and the potential reduction in all kinds of crime it should cause. On a personal level, while I’m happy with my daughter, I know that in the long run, I would have been just as happy with a son.
If you take yourself down the route of thinking having one sex or another will lead to a specific kind of child, a predetermined childhood, I think you are setting yourself up for failure. No one can predict that a daughter will enjoy cooking or shopping with them, or that a boy will prove your perfect footy companion. If we claim to prefer girls or boys for these reasons, we are only cementing the gender norms women have fought for years to tear down.
FAST FACTS GENDER STATS
In the UK, there are typically around 350,000 male live births every year, with the ratio between male and female births being 105 to 100, according to Gov.uk
Although there are slightly more male births, experts predict that the chances of having a girl vs having a boy is still around 50:50
Gender is decided by the sperm, which can contain an X (female) chromosome, or Y (male) chromosome
Analysis in 2019 suggested that sex-selective abortions, well known in China and India, have led to 23 million fewer girls being born
According to the population estimated for the UK, released mid-2021, there were 34,214,835 women and 32,811,457 men