Status Anxiety | 23 February 2008

It’s a boy! This was the news following my wife’s 20-week scan last week. I know it is infra dig to find out the sex of your baby in advance, but Caroline said she needed to be psychologically prepared just in case it was a boy. She wanted another girl, obviously, and she didn’t want to risk bursting into tears in the delivery suite when the midwife held up the little tyke for her inspection.

I take the opposite view. I like girls as much as the next man, but what my wife has failed to grasp is that the entire point of having children is to enhance your social standing. In this regard, boys are preferable. One of the most famous principles in evolutionary bio-logy is the Trivers-Willard hypothesis which states that wealthy, high-status parents are more likely to have male children. The evolutionary explanation for this is that children generally inherit the status of their parents and sons from wealthy backgrounds are likely to have a large number of sexual partners and, therefore, produce lots of children. Over time, those who possessed this genetic trait multiplied, while those that didn’t eventually died out.

The exact biological mechanism that is responsible for this remains a mystery, but it is a well-documented phenomenon nonetheless. Church parish records from the 17th and 18th centuries, for instance, show that rich landowners in Leezen, Germany, had more sons than daughters, while farm labourers in the same region had more daughters. American presidents have more sons, while the Mukogodo herders of East Africa have more daughters. Admittedly, I’m a fairly recent convert to this way of looking at things. When I told Caroline about this hypothesis she pointed out that after the birth of our first child — a girl — I subscribed to the theory that men with high levels of testosterone were more likely to have girls.