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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."
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.
From the first link: The study did not say why this phenomenon occurred
From the second: They're very cautious about interpreting the cause of their results, and what conclusions could be drawn.
Read past the first line teaser. The meat of the article isn't nearly as bad as one would like to pretend.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
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.
The parent was joking (and I'm surprised that so few have caught it), but apart from that, gender is not simply tied to chromosomes. In fact, there's only one small section of the Y chromosome that causes virilization (SRY) (of it, only one or two genes start the process), and this has been known to migrate on occasion to other genes. There have been a number gender-affecting of mutations that have occurred in the region (including, in one case that I read, a two BP mutation that caused a normal XY female. In another case, a normal XX man didn't even have a migrated SRY, but simply had virilized from other, unknown effects.
Environmental factors can play a strong role, and might have been involved in the latter case. Excessive androgens produced by the mother can lead to degrees of virilization of the fetus; other factors may help cause androgen insensitivity and thus feminization. Gender isn't so clear cut; it just tends to migrate to one extreme or the other because that's genetically advantageous, and the Y chromosome usually acts as a carrier for the genes that activate virilization.
As for what's causing the "engineer shift", that's a really good question... that's a pretty darn big correlation that the article described.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.