Why Fewer Parents Than Ever Want a Baby Boy

New data is showing a seismic shift in sex-preference, upturning millennia of history. What does this mean for mothers of sons?

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

I’m writing to you in the shadow of the Tower of London. I walked past this iconic citadel every day for four years en route to the old print presses on Pennington Street where the Sunday Times offices were once housed. But it’s only today that I finally passed through the West Gate to enter the fortress with my family in tow. Even though I was tugged at speed through the Crown Jewels by two Minions movie superfans, I managed to take in a fair amount of exhibition text, piecing together the Bloody Tower’s chilling narrative.

Thanks to revisionism, there was plenty of intel on both the men and women who have featured in the Tower’s history. As the site of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey’s executions as well as acting as a prison to Elizabeth I, being ‘sent to the Tower’ was as much a terror for women as it was for men. Taking in each turret and palace, I was reminded time and time again how vitally important it once was for women at the apex of the social order to produce a male heir (and ideally a spare). Indeed, her very life could depend on it.

Son preference is both ancient and cross-cultural, transcending class, geography, economic, social and political context. Over millennia, the obsession with Y-chromosomes has impacted population growth as parents have continued to procreate until a son was born, while the practice of female infanticide has been globally, almost universal. Among babies born across the world in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. Roughly 50 million fewer girls have been born than should have been since 1980. It is as heartbreaking as it is inconceivable that so many girls have been aborted or murdered as newborns to reach this level of sex disparity.

However, new reports, noted by The Economist this week are showing something remarkable. Something which we have never seen in recorded history. When it comes to sex preference, the tide is seemingly on the turn worldwide. In 2025, it’s predicted that there will be just (not ‘just’ but relatively speaking) 200,000 missing girls in the worldwide birth cohort. The bias in favour of boys is shrinking in developing countries, while a new yen for girls emerges in the wealthiest regions of the world.

Clear pro-girl bias has been detected in Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, while studies have also suggested a daughter preference in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Portugal. Data also broadly shows there is a greater interest in adopting girls worldwide, while in America, if sex selection is used in IVF, 80% of parents opt to implant female embryos. In many parts of the world, girls are being deemed the more solid investment.