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 potential name for a baby boy.
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.
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, the number is 200,000 and falling. The magazine posed the radical question of what the world might look like if this 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.
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.”
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, 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 firstborn 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.
More men are born naturally, with a global ratio of 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 twentieth 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 the balance 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 it’s cheaper as 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.”
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 a slew of ‘gender disappointment’ clips on social media, in which couples, who have gathered their nearest and dearest together 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. “Not to be having boys, but because I will never raise a child with the shared experience of being female.”
Given that boys have such a bad reputation, if we can’t change the narrative about dangerous men and toxic masculinity, why would anyone want one? Ninety-three per cent of the global prison population is male. It is men who subjugate women, submit them to sexual violence, and kill them. They start wars to kill each other. They are also more likely to kill themselves.
In the UK specifically, though it’s a universal trend, 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 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.
The lack of female partners has led to the phenomenon of angry single men, their fury fanned by influencers like Andrew Tate, who has successfully 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 call themselves “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.
