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For millennia, the birth of a boy was a cause for celebration—and the birth of a girl, occasionally, a cause for regret. In many cultures sons carried on the family name, inherited land and lit funeral pyres. Daughters, by contrast, left the household with a dowry and little more than blessings. The modern world has not always improved matters: in parts of Asia, ultrasound scans were used as a tool of prenatal discrimination, with chilling results. Yet something extraordinary is now afoot. The age-old global bias in favour of boys is not only vanishing: it is, in some places, reversing. In parts of the rich world daughters are now preferred. The revolution is both cultural and demographic.
The shift can be seen most vividly where the preference for sons was once most pronounced. In South Korea, where parents in the 1990s had more than 200 boys for every 100 girls if their first two children were daughters, the birth ratio today is near the natural level of 105 to 100. In China and India, the most populous contributors to the phenomenon of “missing girls”, sex ratios at birth have steadily drifted back towards the evolutionary norm. The Economist estimates only about 200,000 excess male births (those that deviate from the natural sex ratio) will occur globally this year—a steep fall from the 1.7m peak in 2000.
The fading desire for sons has multiple drivers: rising female education, economic modernisation, smaller families and a growing recognition of the costs of an imbalanced society. In China bachelor villages with no brides have proven a poor advertisement for gender selection. In India government campaigns and social reforms have pushed against patriarchal norms. In both, parents now tend to say they want one boy and one girl.
In the rich world, though, something more curious is happening. Parents who once might have yearned for a strapping boy are now more likely to hope for a daughter. IVF clinics in New York report rising demand for baby girls, at up to $20,000 a go. In Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Japan, polling shows a consistent bias for daughters. In America, the old pattern—where parents with only girls kept trying in the hope of a boy—has reversed. Now it is families with sons who are more likely to roll the reproductive dice again.
The trend is not yet strong enough to skew national sex ratios at birth. But it is visible in the places where choices are most deliberate: adoption, IVF, family planning. Studies show in countries from Finland to Portugal, parents with two sons are more likely to have a third child than those with two daughters. The inference is striking: people are not just tolerating girls—they are valuing them.
Why the shift? Start with the growing burdens—and shrinking promise—of boys. Girls now outperform boys at nearly every level of education. They are more likely to attend university, less likely to be expelled from school, less likely to incite chaos and less prone to delinquency. Teenage boys are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and victims of violence. In America men are nearly four times as likely as women to die by suicide. Even when it comes to leaving the nest, sons lag behind: one in five American men aged 25–34 still lives with his parents, compared with just over one in ten women.
In a world of anxious parenting and competitive childhoods, boys can seem more like liabilities than legacies. They are, in effect, riskier bets. Girls, by contrast, are seen as more diligent, more communicative, more likely to look after mum and dad in old age. The idea of daughters as “safer investments” may seem regressive, but it holds powerful sway even in liberal societies. Indeed, some sociologists believe the preference for girls may reflect not a break with gender norms but a reinforcement of them: the enduring assumption that daughters will care, and sons will drift.
Other explanations suggest more psychological terrain. In a widely cited study of prospective adoptive parents, heterosexual men said they found girls more “interesting” and “emotionally complex”—code, perhaps, for manageable. Lesbians expressed concern about raising boys in a world where masculinity is often portrayed in toxic terms. The cultural reckoning with male misbehaviour—from Harvey Weinstein to Andrew Tate—has left some parents wondering what kind of boy they might be unleashing on the world.
Governments are beginning to notice. Britain’s parliament is investigating male underachievement in schools. Norway has established a Men’s Equality Commission. American governors, from conservative Utah to liberal Michigan, are launching initiatives focused on boys’ wellbeing. These are not the kinds of programmes that tend to generate headlines. But they suggest societies are beginning to grapple with a new kind of gender imbalance—not of numbers but of prospects.
This should prompt caution as well as celebration. The horror of sex-selective abortion still haunts China and India, where skewed ratios persist in pockets. In China alone 100,000 female fetuses are still aborted a year. Globally around 45m girls have yet to be “restored” to the natural balance. Meanwhile new reproductive technologies—early blood tests, sperm sorting, cheaper IVF—make it ever easier for parents to select the sex of their children. If the desire for daughters gathers momentum, the risk of replicating the sins of the past, in reverse, grows stronger.
At present there is little evidence a pro-girl bias leads to systematic discrimination against boys. But preferences have consequences. They shape family size, parental investment, even national education policies. And once expressed, they tend to grow. After all, if daughters are now the “trophy children”—a blend of dutiful and high-achieving—then boys may soon be seen as burdens and blemishes.
The arc of gender history may be bending away from patriarchal dominance. But it is not yet bending toward balance. For generations the world has undervalued girls and overindulged boys. It would be ironic indeed if, in the name of progress, it began to do the reverse. ■
