Boy or girl?
While expats in Beijing love to think that its only the Chinese that have a strong preference for male offspring, data from a recent New York Times article suggests that preferences are similar in the west as well — in this case the United States.
Th New York Times Economix blog shows that according to historical Gallup Poll data, parents in the US have exhibited a strong preference for boy babies vs girl babies for the past 70 years.
This New York Times graphic shows that Americans also show a preference for boys when considering children
It seems that it’s the young, dumb men that are the driver of this preference, as the article goes on to note that women report no strong preference either way; the less educated show a stronger preference for boys than the more educated; and that this preference for boys declines dramatically with age.
One thing the article does not touch upon is whether Americans tend to do anything about this preference. Whereas most couples in China are restricted to one child (and therefore abortion as a means of sex selection is not unheard of, and the media frequently trumpets the alarming gap between male and female births in China) — there’s no indication from the article that the actual resulting births in the US are following the same worrying trend.