- Apparently there’s a worldwide shift in preference for baby girls over baby boys, reversing an age-old bias;
- The article cited doesn’t explain the evolutionary rationales for these shifting preferences, but I do;
- And it reveals reasons why girls, in their own way, are smarter than boys;
- And music by Jocelyn Pook.
Is this real? What would explain this?
Vox, Bryan Walsh, 15 Jun 2025: The stunning reversal of humanity’s oldest bias, subtitled “Everyone wants to be a girl dad now.”
This piece discusses the evidence, which seems legitimate enough, without at all wondering how the bias toward boys arose in the first place, or *why* it would be changing. It begins:
Perhaps the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a public ceremony called the amphidromia, fathers would inspect a newborn and decide whether it would be part of the family, or be cast away. One often socially acceptable reason for abandoning the baby: It was a girl.
Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially “missing” — meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren’t.
Pause right here. Why would a bias for boys exist in the first place? This an easy question given any understanding of human evolution, and of evolutionary psychology. (Which I’ve explored in many books discussed on this site.) First: boys can, potentially, have many more children than girls can. Just think it through. Second, especially in primitive societies, men were valued for their strength and aggression… against men from other tribes. (Tiptree captured this thought well in one of her stories.) And even in more advanced societies, men are regarded as relatively expendable. Women and children are to be saved first. Because, spelling this out, if humanity, or even one tribe, were reduced to just a handful of members, it would do better with several girls/women and one boy/man, than the reverse. (There’s a genuine rationale for the society in Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE, even if it’s abhorrent by our current society’s standards.)
Moving on:
But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios.
There’s the link to the Economist article, but I’m not a subscriber so I can’t see it.
And then there’s this:
So how, exactly, have we overcome a prejudice that seemed so embedded in human society?
For one, we have relaxed discrimination against girls and women in other ways — in school and in the workplace. With fewer limits, girls are outperforming boys in the classroom. In the most recent international PISA tests, considered the gold standard for evaluating student performance around the world, 15-year-old girls beat their male counterparts in reading in 79 out of 81 participating countries or economies, while the historic male advantage in math scores has fallen to single digits.
Girls are also dominating in higher education, with 113 female students at that level for every 100 male students. While women continue to earn less than men, the gender pay gap has been shrinking, and in a number of urban areas in the US, young women have actually been outearning young men.
One more bit:
Parents around the world may now prefer girls partly because they see them as more likely to take care of them in their old age — meaning a different kind of bias against women, that they are more natural caretakers, may be paradoxically driving the decline in prejudice against girls at birth.
Now, all of this is *very* interesting, and it’s another reflection of how humanity’s environment has changed from the ancestral one to the modern one. The world is filling up; people in wealthier countries realize they don’t need to have as many kids as the ancients did, in part because of higher childhood survival rates. (Because science.) To the extent that tribal warfare is diminishing, the value of men as aggressive fighters is diminishing, though of course men would deny that. (They transfer their aggressions to sports, perhaps.)
Most fascinating is how, once social strictures are eliminated, women do better at intellectual topics than do men. It’s easy to speculate why. Raising a child is a far more demanding, intellectual task, than the things men do, which are fathering children, and fighting other men.
Again, this article misses the underlying rationales for these demographic shifts. It ends:
But make no mistake — the decline of boy preference is a clear mark of social progress, one measured in millions of girls’ lives saved. And maybe one Father’s Day, not too long from now, we’ll reach the point where daughters and sons are simply children: equally loved and equally welcomed.
Sure, fine.
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Jocelyn Pook. Some of this music was used in Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, which is how it came to my attention. (Alas, this YouTube video include commercials.)
