"Americans would prefer a boy to a girl if they could only have one child. In the poll of 1,020 adults, 40 percent said they’d pick a boy, while 28 percent said they’d choose a girl. The rest had no preference.
Funny thing is that the results are similar to attitudes measured by Gallup in 1941, when the boy preference was a 38 percent to 24 percent margin. In fact, Gallup’s done the same poll 10 times since 1941 and the results have always skewed in favor of boys."
More men prefer boys (no surprise), less educated prefer boys more (hmmm…) and Republicans are more likely to prefer boys than Democrats. I’m just not sure what it all means…
I have three boys, and am so glad that I don’t have any girls. You never hear of boys running off to another state with some stranger they met on Facebook…
Hmm. I was listening to a woman plugging her book on sex selection in Asia on Forum yesterday, and she said that when people in the US actually choose the sex of a baby they tend to choose girls, which is much different from the case in China. Perhaps enough of the undecided come down on the side of girls, or maybe people do something different from what they say they would do hypothetically.
Probably that’s related to the education correlation the OP mentioned. Most people don’t have the resources or opportunity to do sex selection of their children, and those who do will tend to be in a higher socioeconomic class and better educated. Which still doesn’t explain why the correlation exists, of course.
One thing I can think of is that historically it was the male that went off to earn the living and I’m thinking that maybe the parents think, maybe even subconsciously, that having a boy will help out their living situation eventually and be more able to take care of them when they get too old to work themselves.
On the other hand, my World of Warcraft server had an incident where a tweener from Texas wound up in the home of an unrelated 40+ housewife in Ontario, Canada… so less likely, I’ll grant you that.
If you’re only having one child there is an evolutionary justification for “investing” in a male as opposed to a female - which may or may not apply to human societies.
You should also consider the difference between having one child and having two or more - perhaps American families who use sex selection are those having boys but lacking girls and want to “balance” their offspring.