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Engineers Have More Sons, Nurses More Daughters
Bifurcati writes "While it might be irrelevant for many /.ers, a recent study has shown that people in stereotypically male professions (engineering, IT, mathematics, etc) are more likely to have sons than daughters, while nurses, therapists and teachers tend to produce more girls. Based on independent survey data, engineering types produce 140 boys to every 100 girls, while nurses and the like produce 135 girls to 100 boys. The explanation is unclear, but it might have interesting long-term social implications. A more detailed summary of the journal article is available on Illuminating Science."
Does it come out as a trannie?
Studies have shown that a mother-to-be's diet high in calcium and magnesium including milk, beans, cereals, cheese and nuts may favor a baby girl, whereas a diet high in pizza and coke apparantly favors the conception of a baby boy.
That's why they do the graduate engineering/nursing mixers!
The Raven
Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causality."
This is good news as hot nurses have sex 135 times for every time a slashbot jerks off to anime porn
So.. engineers should marry teachers?
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
So if a nurse mated with an engineer, is there more of a chance of hermaphrodism?
I think it's far more likely that it's not what job you're doing, it's what job you tend to want to do.
Just the news I need to hear in order to start my line of supersmart offspring that will form the ultimate Revenge of the Nerds. Mwuhahahahahahahha
Oh wait, according to my calculations the probability of me getting laid is 3x10^-8
Duh! It's because boys have boys and girls have girls. Oh, wait...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
More testosterone in the womb leads to boys.
What does this have to do with the father? What does this have to do with which sperm gets into the egg?
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Crap, I was looking forward to having 1 boy, and 1 girl. Now I find out I need 1.4 boys, until I can have my 1 girl.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Does it come out as a trannie?
Do you mean "comes out" as in born or "comes out" as in closet?
This really seems like an interesting ratio that popped outof some calculations, i.e., nice, but not really meaningful.
/. and other places - correlation is not necessarily causation.
I mean, how would somebodies profession really determine his/her childs' sex? I'm sure that mining other datasets would lead to similar 'interesting' ratios/facts.
As has been mentioned on
The article doesn't mention cause - it's an article about the correlation, and nothing more.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
The Illuminating science article in case of Slashdotting follows:
Apparently, parents who are in stereotypically "masculine" professions such as physics, accounting or engineering are more likely to have a baby boy than those in nursing or other more "feminine" jobs.
This is interesting enough that I went back to the original article [ I doubt that link will work in general. The reference is: Kanazawa and Vandermassan, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 233(4) pp589-599 (2005)] They were exploring a proposed explanation for autism - that there exists "the "male brain," which is particularly designed for "systemizing," and the "female brain," which is especially suited for "empathizing." The systemizing brain, as you'd expect, is all to do with understanding the underlying laws of a system, whether that's mathematics or how to play darts. The empathizing brain, again as you'd expect, is all about understanding emotions and responding appropriately to emotional triggers, understanding what people are thinking. The theory seems to be that men typcially have systemizing brains ("Type S"), while women have empathizing ("Type E"), which gave them specific evolutionary advantages (hunting/tools/etc and making friends within new groups respectively). Basically, it's just putting the (perhaps justified) stereotypes on a more physiological footing, I think. It's suggested then that autism may result when someone has an excessively male-type brain, and so excel at certain tasks, but may not have "normal" social skills. This explains many, but not all, of the clinical signs of autism.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that the researchers wanted to look at the correlation between professions (which should in turn correlate, even if weakly, with brain type, particularly, they claim, in the U.S. where people are reasonably free to choose the job best suited to them) and the sex of the children in order to investigate the heriditary connection. They found that parents in engineering, science and mathematics are more likely to have sons, while therapists, school teachers and nurses are more likely to have daughters. The odss seem about 130 boys to 100 girls for male professions, and visa versa for the females. Furthermore, having more sons results in having fewer daughters, with all other variables controlled for, and visa versa. So that really seems to suggest that if you've had one son, your chances are actually higher of having more, and the Malcom in the Middle family of four boys perhaps isn't as unlikely as it seems! They suggest that as males typically have systemizer brains, they'll tend to have male children, and similarly for females - so as a couple, they battle it out for brain type dominance! Two mathematicians are more likely to give birth to a boy, while two nurses are more likely to have a girl. A physicist with a therapist, or two more "average" professions will have a 50/50 chance, as you'd typically expect.
They're very cautious about interpreting the cause of their results, and what conclusions could be drawn. One suggestion is that the level of hormones (e.g., tetosterone) in both parents plays a role in determining the sex of the baby. I don't really understand this myself - I'm not sure if they've established a link between hormones and "brain type". But there really does seem to be something there - their results are quite convincing, at least to a non-specialist like myself.
Of course, the media has promptly taken things one step further and suggested that "Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy". Perhaps this is true - but that might be reading more into the report than is good for it.
Interestingly, my team (about 20) is almost the exact opposite. On our unix admin team (maybe a dozen) we have a guy with 1 daughter, another with 2, another with 1, another with 3, etc. Interestingly, our female members have boys.
What about those couples, like myself, who have an IT guy and a nurse (to be)?
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy, a report has said.
Is that it has something to do with genes. I think boys are more likely to get a Y chromosome, while girls are more likely to get an X. I'm planning a PHD thesis around this.
The gender is determined by the chromosome set when sperm and egg fusion. That has nothing to do with testosterone levels later experienced in the womb.
If it really is correlated, then that itself is quite interesting. Casuality makes little sense here anyway--that's like presuming writing equations on a chalkboard kills XX sperm.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
either/or I just want to ensure a steady supply of trannie porn for the next generation.
There is such an ever-increasing amount of people jumping to conclusions about a correlation.
It's in every field: Socio-political studies, economics, health, etc.
my dad is an engineer and my mom is a nurse. they had 4 boys.
Hopefully (we dont have children yet), I'll have a healthy boy or girl, who will take great care of me AND my source code in my very old age.
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
Would be my first guess.
So, if a nurse and engineer have only one child, chances are it will be a hermaphrodite? Suppose if they conceive it doggy-style they will have a hermaphrodite puppy? I hate these types of studies.
I used to work as a chemical engineer, and switched careers to software engineering. I have two daughters and no sons. I did date a nurse though, a couple of decades ago...
There are proponents of different techniques that supposedly let you choose the sex of your child. One interesting technique is called the Shettles Method. One family that I know swears by this method. They are four for four in getting it to work.
At any rate, perhaps different personalities or lifestyle conditions between engineers and nurses would help to explain this data - if indeed there is any credence to Shettles or similar methods.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
"While it might be irrelevant for many /.ers"
should have stopped there, /.ers dont know what sex is let alone girls. lets think about these storys before they are posted. now we will all wonder what a "girl" is
CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION! CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!
My statistics professors are currently:
a) rolling in their graves
b) suffering cranial detonations
c) weeping like Baby Jesus
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
So that is the reason I met almost no girls in my physics education ;)
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
uhhh my mother is a mental health nurse and my father is an engineer and yes, I'm transsexual.
shit.
It's kinda funny that my Dad is an engineer and my Mom is a nurse. My parents had 2 boys.
might shed more light on this matter.
So what happens when an Engineer marries a nurse? Well.. so far 1 daughter.. I'll let you know once we have a more statistically relevant sample, and I'm putting them all through college.
...Engineers have bad luck getting the ladies
I am an engineer and my wife was a nurse. That explains why we had G, B, G, B (in order of appearance).
Half of each.
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
If this is study is correct, then India should be an all male county (think software, etc.) and the US an all female county (think health care, etc), no?!
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Of course, the media has promptly taken things one step further and suggested that "Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy". Perhaps this is true - but that might be reading more into the report than is good for it.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
I'm an EE, I have a good friend who's an EE, and another good friend who's a software E.
Among us there are five kids, and every single one of them is a girl. (They each have two, I have one)
Obviously we weren't included in the survey.
And when I worked at Atari, the Engineers and game developers were convinced that CRTs kill male sperm because most of them had baby girls, in fact I believe it was over 90% girls.
I think someones just yanking our chain.
Raydude
Conception has no memory. It's a 50% (roughly) shot- each time, every time.
Male sperm is more abundant but weaker than female sperm. So in an amenable environment, male sperm are more likely to implant and reproduce. In a hostile environment, the hardier female sperm are more likely to survive.
I'm therefore not at all surprised by the result that couples are more likely than chance to have "more of the same" sex children.
I also would not discount the testosterone theory out of hand.
The study did not say why this phenomenon occurred, but The Sunday Times quoted a specialist in evolutionary psychology as saying it could be because the children of "systemiser" parents appeared to encounter more testosterone in the womb, making their gender more likely to be male.
We know what these psychologists were doing in biology class, and it wasn't paying attention to what was being taught.
I've heard that other studies have found that it's the male's contribution that decides whether a child will be male or female. The ABC article seemed to imply that both contribute.
This also opens questions as to whether the "chosen" profession affects it or is the genetic makeup that is more likely to produce a male is also more likely to choose an engineering profession and visa versa. The media took this a couple steps farther than the origional scientists to try and show that we can naturally control the sex of our babies.
Nurses Have More Daughters, Engineers More Sons.
I'm an Engineer and my wife's a nurse - We have 3 daughters and 1 son
I wonder if there is a corresponding bias based on which O/S is your preference?
I've got a PhD in physical chemistry and two boys. Not sure how I managed to affect that.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I mean, how would somebodies profession really determine his/her childs' sex?
Actually, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine various factors that may influence gender related to ones occupation. For instance, most technology workers spend a lot of time on their bottoms whereas nurses tend to be more active during the workday. Tech workers wear "standard" clothing, nurses tend to wear looser clothing, potentially leading to differences in body temperatures in, er, _those_ regions (which we know that at least in males does affect fertility at a minimum).
So really, is it that far fetched to imagine that these slight/subtle differences can actually affect the gender of a child?
Easy explanation: people in stereotypically male professions, except for jocks, are less able to attract an attractive mate. This sad fact leads them to disproportionately engage in sex using the "doggy" position to avoid looking at each other's ugly faces. And, as has been proven, this results in semen getting in closer to the egg where the male sperm can impregnate. Face-to-face intercourse requires sperm to swim farther, giving the advantage to the female sperm, which have greater stamina and can impregnate after all the wimpy male sperm have died out.
We had twins, a boy and a girl. :)
All bets are off, however, if said "specialist" hails from one of the fine institutions of secondary schooling in certain states of the Union which espouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_designint elligent design, in which case my sympathies are sincerely tendered.
And they had me and my sister. So that tracks
I guess the 140/100 vs 135/100 difference explains why my sister's a lesbian.
My wife is a Social Worker and I am a programmer. So we have 50/50 chance?
The actual article (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 233, p589-599 "Engineers have more sons, nurses have more daughters: an evolutionary psychological extension of Baron-Cohen's extreme male brain theory of autism" by Satoshi Kanazawa and Griet Vandermassen and available through Elsevier's Science Direct) came out in December 2004 an is available online for those whose institutions subscribe, notes the following correlations:
This is based on survey data from US professions of around 1500 people. Only some of the professions are categorized as "systemizing" and "empathizing" so presumably the sample size is much smaller than that . The sample size isn't listed directly in the article but it appears to be about 20% of the 1500 with at least one parent so categorized profession, for around 300 people or so. Most professions are neutral in the "systematizing/empathizing" continuum, apparently.
Amoung those with "systemizing occupations" had regression coefficients of
From the classification of professions:
Systemizing occupations
Empathizing occupations
Presumably other professions are regarded as neutral in this spectrum.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I'm an engineer. My wife is a nurse. We have one daughter and one son. Go figure.
A friend in the Navy told me the reason why so many Navy families have girls is that all the guys are exposed to high RF equipment that messes up their manhood. Now there are safety lines drawn on the floor to help them avoid exposure but ships are usually crowded and an emergency means the painted lines don't apply.
The study did not say why this phenomenon occurred, but The Sunday Times quoted a specialist in evolutionary psychology as saying it could be because the children of "systemiser" parents appeared to encounter more testosterone in the womb, making their gender more likely to be male.
yeah, the above quotation from TFA destroys any reasonable claim to validity this study purports...in other words, this study/article/post is bullshit
Just more silly science. If they wanted to make this claim legitamitly, they would need to show a relationship between testosterone levels in men and women and the sex of their children, THEN they would have to show a relationship between a person's occupation and testosterone levels, while also accounting for any other variables (such as diet) that might alter testosterone levels in a person.
We've got a long way to go before this bullshit becomes actual science.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Well, it didn't sound too scientific, but it made sense to me. Since then, every statistics like that I was able to explain with my grandmother's theory. Face the facts guys, you might have got yourselves some wives to pretend you are not such geeks, but they are not really getting any, do they...? :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
my aunt produce 2 boys, and she is a nurse of 20 or more years?
doesnt add up to me.
...and we're currently pregnant with our first child. I'll keep you all posted on how things turn out. ;-)
Actually, as long as the baby is either a boy or a girl, I'll be happy...
My dad was an engineer and my mom was a nurse. They had three boys, no girls. They said they would have stopped at two kids if the second had been a girl. I'm sure it's my dad's fault; overbearing as he is, he didn't deserve to have a daughter. His mind-set probably killed off all his X-chromosome sperm (mind over matter, see?) before they ever had a chance to exit! :)
What about Gaylord Focker?
The study may be right, but the explanation is total crap.
The Sunday Times quoted a specialist in evolutionary psychology as saying it could be because the children of "systemiser" parents appeared to encounter more testosterone in the womb, making their gender more likely to be male.
Yeah, but there is no evidence to support that.
Instead, it could be that engineers, who are obviously well educated (and thus the head of the family) and more likely to be men, favor boys. and so if the first kid is a boy, they say "enough kids! One is enough". And if the first kid is a girl, they say "let's go for another kid until we have a boy!"
On the flip side, the same may be true for the nurses: Most nurses are women, and nurses are well-educated, and therefore are more likely to be the de facto head of the family. If the first kid is a boy, they say "let's go for another kid until we have a girl".
I think it's a wild leap to assume that there is some genetic predisposition involved here. Maybe there is, but this study doesn't show it.
Didn't he have a daughter?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Nurses also tend to be very sweet girls(speaking from a guy point of view). I think the sweet, caring, nurturing type of girls are naturally attracted to a nursing career. I've dated two nurses. One was a LPN and the other was a RN. I'm single, so I don't have to turn in my geek card. However, if I ever luck up and date another nurse, I will latch on. I recommend you do the same :)
Conception has no memory, but the distribution of X and Y chromosomes in sperm has genetic links. That is, some men produce more X or more Y chromosomal sperm. So that is where these notions come from. Too bad Henry VIII 's wives didn't realize this- it would have saved a lot of trouble if they had just snuck off and met up with someone who already had produced a family of 8 boys...
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/jwp/t eaching/c81mst/readings/amazing.pdf
This NewScientist article above says:
"84 per cent of the children of Israeli fighter pilots are girls"
We should expect results which appear curious if we keep searching through vast amounts of data for curious results. Note that this survey used a small cohort of 3000 people, which is very small in terms of population studies.
"While it might be irrelevant for many /.ers"
Ahahahah!!! Oh, too funny. I almost busted up at a very inopportune time (what I get for slashdotting when I shouldn't).
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Conception has no memory...
Yes, it does, and she wonders why I never call her the next week.
I don't know what upsets me worse, that I must not be a manly enough engineering type, or that I am unnecessarily skewing the statistics.
:)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Have you ever wondered why fat parents have fat children? Or why Chinese parents have Chinese children? It's no coincidence.
And the point of this crappy article is? Sounds like a pile of hog wash that is a bad excuse for a survey.
"... while a therapist and a chat show host would be odds-on favourites for a daughter."
This implies that we have a large enough sample of chat show host data to draw a statistical conclusion.
Just how many chat show hosts are there, for pete's sake!?
This explains my 2 sons, but where the hell did the triple nipples come from .. 2 boy, six nipples
No no, OS X favors girls, Linux/UNIX (excluding OS X) favors boys, windows favors inbreeding.
"Duh! It's because boys have boys and ..."
Wow! And I thought that passing a kidney stone was painful.
There is no doubt that a babies sex can be influenced by a number of criteria. Male sperm tends to be faster, but live shorter lives. Female sperm is hardier, but slow. So a women who is slightly acidic or base will tend to kill the male sperm leaving female sperm. Likewise, if traditional sex prevails (male on top) with a laying around afterwards, then male has better chance (shorter distance, as gravity helps carry the sperm further up (BTW, so does a women's orgasm). But if women on top, then sperm has further to go, so more likely that female sperm wins.
So why relevant? Nurses, teachers, etc have a healthier attitude about sex. More likely the women are on top (or at least have a varied sex life). Girl wins.
Engineers are more conservative, so more likely to be on top. Boy wins.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I saw a danish study last year that proved the opposite. They had only studied the fathers since it is the sperm that decides the sex, and clearly showed that men in male dominated workplaces had more daughters.
The exact same thing has been demonstrated in many animals with the interpretation that we are unconsciously trying to fix the perceived sex ratio.
Remember that individual hormone balances in the father and the mother DO affect the sex of the baby that tends to be conceived, and those hormones tend to shape their owner's brain as much as their reproductive systems. It's likely that nurses and teachers are driven by a combination of hormones tending to more female production, as well as disposing their brains to their chosen professions, or more likely, the qualities which make them take interest in those professions. Ditto the engineers.
FWIW, when my wife and I were working at building our family, I read that the frequency of intercourse had an effect, such that more frequent sex made more boys (by a smaller margin than this study claims to have). Draw your own conclusions.
I already have a girl, so apparently I need to have 1.4 boys. The whole boy is gonna be fine but what am I gonna do with 40% of a boy? I mean, aside from encouraging him to be a high school social studies teacher.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
implications. Unless you really think that's a new phenomenon.
Canthros
Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causality."
In the mathematical sense (if A then {always} B) that's true.
In the common meaning of imply ("If A is correlated with B and B follows A then A MAY cause B.") it sure does.
A strong correlation hints that there's a causative mechanism - either the later-appearing item occurring as fallout of the observed earlier-appearing item by some chain of influences, or both of them being the result of such chains from some other common precursor.
Doesn't PROVE it. But raises alarm bells.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... has shown that women holding stereotypically male jobs gave birth more times to boys than workers holding stereotypically female jobs who are men
I should marry a nurse, and get a nice hermaphrodite.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Has adoption been corrected for?
it was learned you are 80% likely to have an afro-american child if you belomg to the NBA....
...those who can't count in binary , and those who can't count at all.
Because this means that as all of us engineers starve to death due to outsourcing and more and more nurses are trained due to the increasing age of our population, there'll be more babes to get! Hey wait... I'll be dead. Or too old to care. Man, this sucks.
That is all.
A freind of mine has a child (boy) an is an (software) engineer. But his wife is a nurse. So, how does that fit into this new theory?
that's ok, now you can just blame all your problems on genetics ;-)
What happens when an Engineer plugs into a Nurse? Do they get this? http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/l/lordfanny.jpg
I work in IT. My wife teaches nursing. Does this mean we'll have a boy and a girl (please)? :)
I think that skitz0 (89196) would like to meet you (or is that "meat" you).
:)
Either/or... I could take pictures.
(Actually, the one tranny I've been introduced to looked like a truck driver in a dress and a wig (and yes, we're talking transexual, not transvestite).
Gave me the willies.....
I don't think I'd attempt something like that unless I was at least passable. That poor person was stuck in the middle.
I agree! Especially since the male ALWAYS determines the sex of the child.
This is simply not true except in the most simplistic sense. Sperm counts (according to the wikipedia) have a normal range of 20 to 180 million per millileter. There are countless sperm carrying both the X and Y chromosone vying for the prize.
There are subtle differences between X and Y bearing sperm in robustness and mobility, IIRC; it is possible that the male can influence conception sex by producing sperm of each type that are relatively more or less fit with respect to each other, and that the female may likewise influence this by providing an environment that is relatively more or less challenging.
On the other hand, there is a huge difference between a male and female embryo. Males have a higher mortality rate throughout their lifetime. For example sex ratio at birth is slightly skewed male (typically something like a 5% difference), but the ratio gets more even as you approach adulthood through higher infant mortality rate.
There seems to be some evidence (gleaned from reading Science News and other sources), that this process of winnowing males starts in utero, although the situation is very complex sice we're talking environmental factors. For example, smoking parents tend to produce relatively more girls. This can be explained several ways: the male may damage his sperm; the female may make her uterus a more challenging enviornment for the fetus. Both parents are likely to be exposed to each others' second hand smoke.
I't hard to say for somebody outside the field following this through the popular science press, but the impression I get is that there have been a variety of studies which suggest that environmental stressors reduce the sex ratio at birth (reduce the number of males). Perhaps engineers have less stressful jobs than therapists?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
the researchers then prattled on about this being proof for there being more girls being born than boys, as there are more women giving birth out of wedlock and aren't being pestered for sex... thus concieving perhaps when they aren't most fertile.
How is this related to the topic? I have no idea.
A good friend of mine is a nurse and all of HIS children are boys.
Maybe you generate more girls if you spend a big chunk of your day standing and walking around.
It's long been know that males are quick and fragile while females can hang in there for the long haul and take it. The best example is extreme distance swimmers. Males are much more prone to hypothermia and do not convert energy stores well after extreme periods of sustained activity.
In the engineering and nusring professions, people tend to spend a lot of time sitting down. The don't move around much.
In nursing and teaching, people are on their feet all the time. Bouncing around, chasing wayward kidz and geriatrics.
What happens is the eggz and spermz in the people that spend a lot of time sitting around have not been hangoing on for dear life all day and when these folks hop in the sack, those male oriented gammeetz are fresh and ready for the sprint. The beat out the females handily.
With those other busy folks the male oriented gammeetz are totally fagged out by the end of the day and just can't seem to get it together for even a little waltzing, let alone a mad dash to comingulation of DNA's
in communist cuba, Windows snitches on you. To Cuban and US authority.
That article was from about 6 months ago, I suppose the answer is show us the data not the bias. Data can be sliced and diced in many ways.
The Economist (reporting another study)liked to think about why would evolution have it that way. Therin lies generalities and arguments with people who make a busines out of arguing about prejudice.
[I shall RTA in due course]
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Or more importantly, who is doing it.
We have two groups of children: One group has a parent who is in a "male" profession, like engineering, and the other has a parent in a "female" profession, like nursing.
What is far more likely to be true of a child with a parent who is in a female profession as opposed to a child with a parent in a male profession?
They're more likely to have a mother who works.
Seems pretty obvious to me: Working moms are more likely to have girls. Might have something to do with Y-chromosome sperm being more fragile than X-chromosome sperm. (That's been demonstrated elsewehre.)
paintball
I'm in IT and my wife is a nurse. We have one of each.....
My wife and I are both engineers. We have two kids, both daughters.
Should I play PowerBall ?
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
Oh, and I thought Gnome favoured boys, while KDE favoured girls?
BTW, what about Emacs and vi?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Does that mean, as a potential maths teacher, I'm statistically most likely to have hermaphrodite children? That's not good!...
(n.b. not a statisitics teacher ;)
Christopher Harrison
I don't think I'd attempt something like that unless I was at least passable.
I see.. This may come as a shock so I invite you to take a deep breath and sit down before reading further, but if this is indeed the case I believe there's a moderate possibility that you are not a transsexual.
If this is true, and it is also true that a baby's sex is determined by the sperm only, then this will lead to quick extinction of the human race:
Geeks have more sons, who by virtue of being male have a higher likelihood to becoming geeks themselves. That makes being female (as well as being a nurse) a recessive trait.
I keep seeing replies about emails, which seem to come from a completely different story. Anyone else getting this?
I am trolling
This theory has way to much of a social bias for such a personal relationship issue. Baby creation is about one man and one woman (for now!) maybe these brainy researchers should devise theories closer to reality instead of one that might confirm (or deny) stereotypical conceptions.
I too, have a theory, about who is more likely to have boys as opposed to girls. This theory, at it's core, has more to do with sperm life than career choice. It goes like this:
Assumptions:
Fact 1: Male sperm 'swims' faster than female sperm.
Fact 2: Female sperm 'lives' longer than male sperm.
Theory
Personal sexual agressiveness (or control) determines the sex of a child.
Reasoning There are basically two scenarios here: 1) The female is more sexually agressive or controlling. This would peak during her most important sexual time, ovulation. Since she is more likely to have intercourse during ovulation, the faster male sperm will reach the egg first and cause a boy to be born.
2) When the male is more sexually agressive or controlling, he will not be in tune with ovulation period of his mate. Even though the male sperm is faster, there would be no egg for it to bond with, and the male sperm will die. The longer living female sperm is more likely to have a chance bonding with the egg and, statistically, more females will be born.
If anyone can find fault with this theory, please let me know, I haven't found one serious flaw yet.
I'm sure the research in the article has some merit, but I would question it's conclusions about career choice!!!
I don't know if this has been discussed before (i'm sure it has), but everyone I've talked to about it has never heard of it.
I must not be an engineer! Damn, whole life down the drain.
Does it mean you might be performing overlapping functions???
I'm an engineer. What if I marry a nurse?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
You have to pay to read the original study, but the overview says they hypothesized (in conformnce with a crackpot theory) that engineers would have more boys and Then they did the study and "proved" it. It's very unlikely this will hold up, such a variation in sex by profession would have been noticed before.
I'm an engineer and I have two daughters. The amount of estrogen in this household is hell. Even the bloody dog is female. Here's a study for you, men in otherwise all-female households have prematurely grey hair. Fact. Maybe I'll move out to the garage...
What doesn't make sense about this study, is that it is my understanding that gender is determined randomly in the males genes. The females genes determine other things, but not that.
I shoulda been a nurse (3 daughters, no sons).
IANAL... But I play one on
Consider the following strategies:
If a parent is in a male-dominated field, they keep having kids until they have a male, and then stop.
If a parent is in a female-dominated field, they keep having kids until they have a female, and then stop.
If this strategy is followed 100%, the "target-gender kids per 100 non-target-gender kids" as a function of "average total number of kids in family" would be:
Consider that the average number of kids per family is something like 2.5ish and this strategy isn't 100% followed, but note that even with an average of 2 kids per family and 100% following of this strategy the disparity would be even greater than in the article, with no magic [and scientifically unsound] biological factor needed.
Go back several generations. You have a group of fathers who tend to produce more male sperm than female sperm. Purely by chance, these fathers are engineers. You've got another group of fathers who tend to produce more female sperm. They tend to be medical professionals (doctors or nurses).
These two groups of fathers tend to pass on to their male sons the propensity for male or female sperm. Also, because occupations tend to remain "in the family" (engineer fathers often have engineer sons, and the same with medical professionals), these two chance effects combine and intensify each other over the generations. With each generation, there are more sons following their fathers profession, with their fathers propensity for male sperm.
This is just a wild-assed guess. But it's far simpler than some of the truly weird stuff I'm reading below...
I love this game.
Repeat after me, "I'm a bit daft, and I like to think others will repeat silly things I say from time to time."
Now, go have a beer.
Y sperm are fast and flimsy. X sperm are sturdy and slow. The more chemically hostile a woman's body is the more likely the flimsy Y sperm are to die and the more likely the study X sperm are to fertilize the egg. When a woman is "turned on" her body "tries" harder to become pregnant by changing the chemical nature of her reproductive tract, making it more likely that she will become pregnant (and also much more likely she will have a boy).
Men who are really amazing lovers tend to only have boys.
Given that tenacious problem solvers engineers are, I don't find this article surprising at all.
I read a little-while ago that males who have sex more often will have more sons. Those who have sex less often have more daughters.
You can't handle the truth.
"But according to calculations by chief researcher Satoshi Kanazawa, for engineers and other "systemisers" the ratio is 140 boys per 100 girls.
Nurses and the like produce around 135 girls for every 100 boys, the study found."
The numbers in this article are absurd. Are they seriously suggesting that the numbers are skewed by 40% and they are the first ones to notice?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
In addition to "correlation does not imply causality", you also have to consider the sample space. How do they define "blokey jobs" and "caring jobs"? And why did they pick those categories (however they define them) to look at? There was a study that showed that Israeli Fighter Pilots had an 84% of having girl children (which, by the way, seems to contradict the current study). Here's a link to a PDF that discusses this case (among others), and, for the PDF-adverse, here's the Google HTMLization. The point is that "Israeli Fighter Pilots" was chosen as an "interesting" category because of this stand-out statistic.
:)
From my link: "So going back to the Israeli fighter pilots--is it just random chance or is something else happening? To answer this, conventional statistics would set up the obvious sample space (children of fighter pilots), assign probabilities to boy and girl children, and calculate the chance of getting 84 per cent girls in a purely random trial. But this analysis ignores selective reporting. Why did anyone look at the sexes of Israeli fighter pilots' children in the first place? Presumably because a clump has already caught their attention."
Given that neither ABC News Australia nor Illuminating Science is exactly a reputable scientific journal, I would definitely hold off before reading too much into this. I also want to know how they explain the contradiction with the Israeli Fighter Pilot data.
...and we tried all the tactics you can supposedly use to determine the sex of your child, since we both wanted a girl. Right down to diet, monthly timing, position, etc.
It only took us about a week to embrace that we were having a boy, however. I guess engineer trumps teacher in this example.
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
...that there's an interesting correlation between 'a surprising "statistical conclusion" gets posted to slashdot' and 'said conclusion turns out to be complete and utter crap'.
Maybe posting articles on Slashdot makes the underlying data invalid in some way? I guess we need more study...
No wonder the Chinese are keen to take up technical functions of the USA (engineering/manufacturing). This goes with their cultural plans of favoring boys over girls. They think long term over there. I can hear it now in China, "By the year 5320, the USA will be in the hands of women, ripe for easy picking." Little do they know with how to deal with an angry American female, much like the rest of this forum.
"While it might be irrelevant for many /.ers..."
;-)
but of course, it involves sex after all.
Math Teacher
Wouldn't this mean, according to logic, the balance would go to equal opportunity for either gender, or a hermaphrodite?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I think one should separate any possible mechanism from the reason why this difference in male/female offspring ratio occurs.
In a species that is not (strictly) monogamous (such as humans) and where the status of the offspring is at least partly inherited, it is beneficial for high ranking females to have more male offspring and for low ranking females to have more female offspring. Rich powerful chiefs, kings etc had many children whilst a lot of men had none. However, most females had children, whatever their social status.
Thus, since engineers (at least in some countries, my condolences to those living in the UK) have higher social status than nurses, they have more male offspring.
This has been observed in many other species and there is a debate whether it is true for humans. After a lot of googling I managed to find the article below. Essentially, one can explain the difference in genetic spread between the Y chromosome and other genetic material by assuming that in each generation, half of all men fathered all children whilst the other half was childless. (All women had children).
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=4895
Now I know why my dad has 4 sons and only one daughter, he's a civil engineer!! But I just keep asking myself why so many...
Well, my wife and I, both engineers (she with a degree in mathematics, I work in IT) have 2 girls.
Woman with a healty attitude towards sex - husband wins. :)
Seriously, I think this "study" is to science what E! is to journalism. So what happens when an engineer marries a teacher? What about women engineers? Male teachers?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What if two engineers get together?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
...an engineer marries a nurse? This is dumb.
You seem to misunderstand the correlation is not causation concept.
It is true that just because engineers have more boys does not mean engineering causes the birth of boys. A correlates with B does not imply that B causes A, or vice versa.
HOWEVER, that does not mean there is no relationship between the two. Clearly there is.
They may both be caused by a third thing. It may be that engineers misreport the genders of their children. It may be that engineers tend to have dangerous accidents that kill daughters early, but sons can duck.
The fact that correlation does not imply causation reminds us to look for these possibilities. It does *not* tell us to ignore the data, and that correlation is insignificant.
I think this sounds about right since I've always been very confused about what I wanna be when I grow up, 37 now, and I have one boy and one girl! So if we go by that, rather than apply science, then maybe this one more in the seemingly endless stream of ridiculous studies, that I paid for, then it must be accurate. Oyyy! - - - - Business Email Application Server: http://www.xmmailserver.com/
- - - Email Application Server http://www.xmmailserver.com
My Sister in law has two boys. I'm an engineer
and have three sons.
Who thinks this stuff up? A genetic dispostition is more like it.
Another "Nerds don't get girls" article.
Proof positive: I'm a software engineer and my wife is an ER nurse - we have 2 girls and 2 boys. (and NO, we have no plans to increase the sample pool :-))
So, if I marry a teacher, we should have equal chances of a boy or girl and a reduced chance that the child will have Asperger's Syndrome unless, of course, she teaches math...
My grandfather, an electrical engineer, had 5 boys and 1 girl. My father, a mechanical engineer, had 5 boys.
Did anyone else read the submission, and detect a faint whiff of Roland Piquipalle?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Newsfollow.com
>BTW, what about Emacs and vi
;)
I don't think their users breed enough to make good statistics
Though I'm not a biologist and have no idea about the truth of this, according to many posts here on /. the hormones in the uterus can influence the sex of the fetus. Apparently, sperm with Y chromosomes aren't very strong in off-nominal conditions (high/low PH, temp, etc), and sperm with X chromosomes aren't that great in high testosterone environments. You can do the research on google for yourself, but I would guess that certain hormones make the Y sperm swim slower or die off, while others are detrimental to X sperm.
/. and the link to ReactOS, so who are you to say a specialist in biology is inconcievably ridiculous?
I'm guessing that you are a software developer based on your reading
IANAL, but I play one on
...you insensitive clod!
My wife, however, has a son. She's a nurse. I'm a software weeny. Are we the counter-example?
Hopefully, this will be marked redundant...
that there was a study showing that people who spent more time in front of a computer were more likely to have daughters.
I would think that existing data (the census for example) would make it quite easy to study this correlation further. If some parents really do have a strong bias towards having children of one gender or the other, then shouldn't the occurance of M-M or F-F siblings be higher than M-F siblings? This data should be just waiting to be extracted out of census results providing a huge sample size. For that matter, it may already be in one of the publically available datasets.
Maybe we need to break this in to more detailed demographic data, taking into account the geopolitical and ethnic locale, type of industry, etc.
"Ad infinitem et ultra!" - Buzz Lightyear
My girlfriend is studying to be a teacher. Now we still know nothing.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
God I hope they weren't funded, but I'm sure they were. Useless research like this wastes resources that could be used to fund "important" projects.
This story is a hoax. The gender of a human child is 100% determined by the father, depending on his contribution of either an X or Y chromosome. The mother contributes only X chromosomes. There's no mention of exclusion of females from the original study; in fact, they seem to be included, though they're irrelevant. And the "evolutionary psychologist" the story quotes states that hormones in the womb influence the child's gender, when that is utterly false. Either this is a planned hoax, or everyone involved should be fired, if not sterilized.
--
make install -not war
I'm an engineer, and my wife is a nurse!!!!
Single datum: our two children are both girls.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Offtopic, but why are there so many trannies in Brazil. Maybe somebody should submit a grant to correlate the effects of sniffing glue to the frequency of trannies.
It's the same as eye color - blue eyed parents having blue eyed children and all. Engineers, predominately guys, are more likely to have male children, while Nurses, predominately gals, are more likely to have female children! What's so hard to understand?
Now the real question is, if a guy and a gal somehow got together and had a kid, what kind of a freak would that be?
They'd probably get funded.
I'm an engineer, and my wife is a nurse.
Two girls.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This study is highly suspect. The total population was I believe only about 3,000, which is not huge, and specifically in the UK, which is a fairly small region, how does one control for cultural pressures?
For example, the engineering professions have a higher concentration of Indians and Asian, both cultures that sometimes have a strong preference against girls, even to the point of infanticide in some extreme cases.
What if the apparent genetic selection against females is really the result of some incidents of selective abortion?
If the author's point was that a lot more intersexed children are being born than we think, this study might have some interesting conclusions, but since that is not actually mentioned in the blurbs I've read (exclusions by the media are certainly possible) one has to assume they literally mean more genetically male children are being born to certain parents. The mechanism for this if true would be fairly fascinating, since males produce X and Y sperm in equal amounts, and there has not been any documented mechanism by which a given egg would give preferential selection to a particular X or Y sperm.
So, geeks are more likely to have boys, while jocks (i.e. those guys studly enough to pick up a nurse) are more likely to have girls. Isn't that somehow counter-intuitive??
However, it does correlate neatly with Darwin - geeky guys are more likely to produce more geeky guys.
Uh.. like some 9 out of 10 transsexuals? It's quite a big step for many.
And yet my father, an electrical engineer, had two daughters...hmmm.
BSCS 1996
4 boys
2 girls
We want to have 7
When asked why I have so many kids, I often reply, "The world needs more people like me!"
The interesting statistic is not so much my immediate kids, but my parents grandkids. My parents have 18 grandkids, but only 5 grandsons and I have 4 of them! I'm the only one of my parents children or children-in-law in any type of engineering or science field. My brother in law has a PHd in family counselling and has 6 daughters!
Might be a good slashdot poll.
1. Do people always stay in a fixed career? For example, I'm now classified as a teaching professional as a Bioinformatician, but started off as a Military Field Engineer, got a degree/job as a Marketing/Sales person and got degrees/jobs in IT fields before ending up here. I have a son, but my ex who's in Tech has an even mix of sons and daughters.
2. Is it pre-selection or post-selection? For example, perhaps people who have daughters tend to choose career paths more amenable to having daughters (or so they think), whilst people who have sons tend to choose career paths that sons work out best with.
3. Was this whole study dreamt up by the Dean at Harvard? I work in Biochemistry in Structural Genomics and we have an even mix of women and men with doctorates here, but the Harvard Dean says women can't do well in sciences - meanwhile here they run labs, author papers, and are just as productive as men. Statistics can be bent to "prove" anything, but that doesn't mean it's "true".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
OK, you're right about the lower PH (acidity) favoring the survival of spem carrying the female gene, but you've completely overlooked why. For any species which can propagate in the one-to-many male-to-female mode, there's an obvious naturally-selected gender control factor: Females impregnated later in their cycles are more likely to conceive males than they would be earlier in their cycles. Why? Duh! It's because if they're getting impregnated late in their cycles, it's likely because there's a shortage of males in the population! Therefore there's a survival-driven selection factor for late-impregnated females to conceive males.
/. nerds!
As for the career/gender thing, gee... do you suppose that the nurses and teachers (usually civil servants) have regular work schedules which allow them to have regular private lives, while engineers, IT people and the like (usually in the commercial sector) work longer, more erratic hours, therefore often having less predictable, stable home lives? Seems to me that could explain that the teachers and nurses simply get more regular nookie than us poor
About the word "if": If bullfrogs had wings, they wouldn't bounce around on their little green butts.
There seems to be a big flaw in this study. In human genetics, the female has nothing to do with the sex of the child. Only the chromosomes carried in the sperm determine the sex of the child. So, are they saying that men that marry nurses or teachers are more likely to pass on "X" chromosomes. The results of this study seem to have all the scientific value of throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal to determine a portfolio of stocks to buy.
What? A story posted on /. irrelevant to /.ers? No fíng way... I can't believe it...
(Most likely in Europe given the culture of sex in the U.S.) does their adopted off-spring grow up to be an Engineer with a nurse fetish?
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Yes, yes... find a new joke, eh? I work in an engineering geek environment, and can hardly find many single people without kids.
The explanation is unclear, but it might have interesting long-term social implications.
Or, like many survey based studies, it may mean any of the following things:
- Fuck all.
- Dick.
- Doodley-Squat.
I just offered one explanation to the naysayers that have earlier said that it could not happen and that this study is worthless. Not sure that I would buy your explanation, but I do think that somewhere down the road some grad students will look over this and find out a lot about us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I married a teacher almost 9 years ago and we have 2 boys. Go figure! Shouldn't I have had 1 of each according to this? Or, perhaps I should have had some form of mutant!
Well, OK, they beat those on political threads.
Considering that there are even more in the US, perhaps there is a correlation after all..
This is so simple it kills me.
If we can agree that there are so many passwords that we all need to remember, it is only natural that SOMETHING has to go. So, Engineers REMEMBER their sons and they forget their daughters while Nurses REMEMBER their daughters and forget their sons. In reality, the ratios are the same for both groups.
I remember BOTH my kids - but I cannot remember any passwords (except \.)
Any sleight-of-hand, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from technology.
Degree in Mathmatics. Worked in the IT industry for 9 years.
Two daughters. No sons.
Amusingly enough, the slashdot pre-article makes **NO** mention if the people involved in these professions are male or female. I know we all assume that they're talking about the fathers in these professions and not female engineers or mathematicians who become mothers, but shouldn't that be made more explicit?
So if I double majored, my kids would be shemales?
Switching to a masculine profession wouldn't do anything - that would not make one masculine in and of itself. Rather, masculine people are more likely to be in engineering or whatever. Masculinity = more boys. Engineering != more boys, however, an engineer is usually masculine, thus the more boys "results".
My guess: UTTER FRAUD. There can be no truth to the article. Think about it. Certainly a huge difference in gender statistics would have been noticed before.
What a baby's mom does canNOT affect the gender of the baby, as it's determined COMPLETELY by the sperm.
Well ... what a an obvious misuse of statistics.
You see, last time I've checked humans beings have 2 parents.
Now, there are the cases in favor in witch both or just one of the parents do have a profession in accordance with the gender of their child.
But only one case against (both parents have a profession that is not in accordance with the gender of the child).
Seems obvious why this numbers appeared (66%), they have got nothing strange with them.
What a fantastic piece of crap in the form of a research paper.
I have an uncle who is an engineer who is married to a nurse.
:)
They have no kids.
I guess they just cancel each other out
Let's experiment.. we've got a lot of engineers here, bring out the scantily-clad nurses!
/. orgy.. what a horrible thought.
A
My father is an engineer, my mother a nurse. What does that make me?
I'm in IT, and my girlfriend is a psychologist. What does that mean for our potential kids. Even odds?
My ex is a nurse, I am an engineer, and we have a son and a daughter :-)
Perl Programmer for hire
Engineers fantasize more about Nurses!
I'm an engineer. My wife's a teacher? What does it all mean for us!?
O - A hard slap
O - An icy stare
O - Legs crossed
O - Walking papers
O - Almost all of the above
if there was some type of breakdown of the statistics.
:D
Are they specifying whether they were talking about the mothers or fathers of these children determining the sex of the offspring.
Are they talking simply about children carried to term rather than conceptions?
But hey, as an engineer, married to a mathematician, with one child of each sex (that's two, for those who were wondering), why should I have an opinion
Other way around for "brain-type" - levels of testosterone are known to affect the structural development of the brain pre-birth (esp how rapidly each half develops. If they're not similar, then one half reaching out to the other will find fewer places to connect so it'll link back to itself, making the person less able to multitask, less socially capable, but able to solve more complex technical problems.
Step back pre-conception, and radiation will kill off more male sperm than female. I've spoken to military comms guys who say there's a very strong trend here - all the guys they know who worked on high-power transmitters have daughters but no sons.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
one thing that IS known to effect sperm development at least is heat during development. This corrilation might track closer to fathers that sit for the better part of thier day vs fathers that don't( nurses expected to have random distribution of both types of fathers of thier children? ( did they study male nurses? ) ). It would be interesting to see the data discected by type of engineer ( assuming for instance civil engineers probably sit a little less then electrical engineers.)
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The study further showed that Slashdot users are more likely to have neither.
I was about to reply to you saying that this reminds me of a cat with buttered toast strapped on to it, when I saw that THREE OTHERS had already replied to you with the exact same thing! Is thinking like this some sort of Slashdotter hallmark?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Male genes determine the sex of the children so the female shouldn't really influence it...
Luke-Jr
Software tester married to a nurse = both children are boys.
I am an engineer and my wifes a nurse, I guess nursing wins, have 2 girs
Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch. Homer watches proudly.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
Me = Engineer
Children = 2 daughters
Sanity = Gone in a few years...
It doesnm't suprise me that gender distribution in a given subgroup is not 50/50. I assume that engineers are more likely to want a boy and nurses are more likely to want a girl. How does want affect the outcome? (ignoring the practice in India and China of aborting female fetuses) Here's a hint: how many couples do you know that kept having children until they got at least one boy?
I was thinking the same thing - but also considering the "fact" that woman get more girls while men get more boys... somehow the conclusion does not compute.
I'm more likely to believe a japaneese study which gave the following data:
On average a normal couple will have a 120 in 200 chance of getting a boy and a 80 in 200 chance of getting a girl. However if one or both parents smoke this is reversed (meaning now its 120 girls and 80 boys out of 200).
This study is very interesting, but it doesn't explain why I have six girls and no boys. I'm a mechanic and CNC programmer in an aerospace manufacturing facility. That's a manly enough job, and yet, no boys... Figures.
Conception doesn't need a memory for the GP's point to be valid. If we assume there is some set of conditions which leads to a greater chance of giving birth to a particular gender (which is what this study implies) then it follows that those who have historically given birth to a particular gender are more likely than average to be in the group with a propesity to give birth to that gender, thus they are less likely to give birth to the other gender in future.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
You know... American's don't like to talk about this due to some weird cultural double standard, but what about the abortion factor (and please remember that I'm trying my best to stay out of that particular moral debate).
...and if you think gender perference isn't gender linked, they you need to go back a read over some the the research that is out there.
In China, there is an over abundance of boys due to state policy; however, where abortions are competely optional (and remember, a wife need not disclose to her husband that she's received an abortion and can effectively hide behind a "miscarrage"), what impact does this availabliy have upon sex selection?
I strongly suspect that, in an egalitarian socity, that sex selection is gender linked (and, more specifically, linked to more successful gender in any given coupling). Weather this is an artifact or concious decision by a few that drives up the numbers in total probably needs to be answered
The article leaves out some very crucial information. Are we assuming here that the engineers are all male and that the nurses are female? What about people who think they are "engineers" but they are really more into business because they suck at being technical or vice versa? It's difficult to determine the definition of an engineer. Is it someone who uses more than just arithmetic on a regular basis, or is it someone who just puts stuff together from blueprints?
unless of course more than one person lands on the avg. score, then some fraction is less than avg,
and given 1 large enough stat say averaging the scores of student A 50, student b 53, student c 57, and student d 100 more than half is below the avg.
student a 0
student b 100
student c 100
student d 100
produces only 1 person below avg.
Gender is determined by the sperm, not after fertilization.
But I teach Phyics and Computer classes. I also have 2 sons. Did I beat the odds? Or is it what I teach that makes the difference. Oh I should also mention that I started in Engineering and changed.
I really think the people who created this study, should study me. I have it all!
Can you really not tell a dominant or submissive guy when you see one?
To me it's clear as day. You can try to rationalize away reality and pretend that it's no longer valid, but it still doesn't change reality.
On the ends of the spectrum you have the alpha-male type and the sissy-boy type. You can pretend that they don't exist, but they do.
The most interesting study to make here would be why so many people jump to the conclusion that all correlations found by studies are causative.
I can think of dozens of possible explanations for this and the idea that the profession changes the outcome would probably be last in my list. Closer to first on my list would be the explanation that flows something like,,, we know that some people definitely have biological tendencies to produce more male offspring and others have biological tendencies to produce more female offspring. We don't know for sure what causes this. Perhaps there are other side effects to the particular mutations that do cause this that cause them to be better suited to certain professions. When looked at across a large sample set, you would see the evidence of those side effects in this way. Given that their is likely hormonal involvement in these mutations and that hormones determine a lot about personality and even how the brain works (especially the degree of connectivity,,, more of which causes a leaning to intuitive thinking and less of which causes a leaning to systematic thinking), I would place a theory along this or a similar line fairly high on the "should be investigated" list. Investigating this theory might be as easy as correlating the reproductive changes simultaneously across jobs and generations.
What's the prognosis for my wife and I? Will we have neither boys nor girls as children? (She's a nurse and I'm an electrical engineer.) -Jonathan
i am one of 11 cousins on my fathers side. 10 are male 1 is female
Excellent, my husband and I have expressed a preference for having a girl when do do finally get around to reproducing.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
...the engineer/artist type? I've got a daughter and I'm the rare melding of artist and engineer. My wife is a librarian. I think the research is flawed because it only focuses on what normally happens and mentions nothing about the exceptions which are far more interesting.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
The following code prints out the ratio of boys (out of 10 million) in the scenario being discussed. It's fluctuates very closely to 50%, corresponding nicely to the analytical argument that each kid is an independent event, regardless of the reason for that kid. But if you trace through the code perhaps that will make more sense.
/* Flip coin until you get a boy. */
/* Loop for four kids while having girls. */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <time.h>
int main() {
int i, kid_count, num_runs;
int children_per_couple, max_children, got_boy, boy_count;
double ratio_of_boys;
struct timeval tv;
unsigned long seed;
gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
seed = (unsigned long)(tv.tv_sec + (tv.tv_usec << (sizeof(seed)*8-20)));
srandom(seed);
kid_count = 0;
boy_count = 0;
num_runs = 10000000;
max_children = 4;
for (i=0; i<num_runs; i++) {
children_per_couple = 0;
got_boy = 0;
do {
kid_count++;
children_per_couple++;
if (random() < (RAND_MAX/2)) {
got_boy = 1;
}
} while (children_per_couple < max_children && got_boy == 0);
boy_count += got_boy;
}
ratio_of_boys = ((double)boy_count) / kid_count;
printf ("%f%% were boys, while selectively waiting until a boy.\n", ratio_of_boys*100);
}
Would be for engineers to marry nurses :)
Then the world would once again be a happy place
Good one. Mod parent funny. :)
I don't know if there's something to this study or not. But it's clear that we don't know everything there is to know about gender and the brain.
So why is it that so many people condemn Lawrence Summers for suggesting that the possibility of statistical differences in the distribution of aptitude of each gender is something that could be worth studying?
There are studies which do show that there probably are such differences. So why are his critics so convinced that there can't be? What do they know that the scientific community doesn't?
Seriously, though humans may have large, biologically expensive brains and the option to use them, mostly they seem driven by the same factors as monkeys and beetles and only use those brains to further their goals.
If you commute and it's not standing room only, then try watching your fellow passengers with the sound turned off. You'll see all kinds of interactions reminicent of other primates, especially when there are two individuals of similar status.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Even if profession has no effect, if you take 100 different professions (in a relatively small sample - say 10000), find for each one the percentage of girls/boys and then compare, you are probably bound to find some that produced slightly more boys and some that produced slightly more girls. You are then free to invent any explanation.
Of course, it's possible that they checked for it and have really found something. I don't know.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
No, I've heard it's a snip. Of course, some people just can't cut it...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And the more "fantastical" the article... The more likely it will appear in /.
Especially these days.
The results seem logical. People in stereotypically male professions tend probably to be male, and those in stereotypically female professions tend more likely to be female. So sex is probably somewhat hereditary: Male people are more likely to have male children, and female more likely to have female children.
...to these friends I have who have three daughters, one son, and matching his and hers engineering PhDs?