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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."
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.
I agree! Especially since the male ALWAYS determines the sex of the child.
Not strictly true.
For starters, X and Y bearing sperm are affected differently by envrionmental factors (such as pH) which has been used in vitro to strongly bias fertilization toward one sex or the other. The female provides the environment (including pH) in which the sperm swim.
There are plenty of other ways a woman's body COULD bias the outcome. Anitbodies - leading to reduced sperm mobility or higher likelyhood of spontaneous abortion for one sex or the other, cytoplasmic factors in the egg, selection-restriction systems on the genes, etc. (Selection-restriction systems may be the reason Y chromosomes are so small - to prevent one from arising there.)
There is at least one species of lizard that takes this to an extreme - it's all-female and actually reproduces by cloning, but requires fertilization by a related species to trigger the start of the egg's conversion to a clone (after which the male's DNA is rejected).
I'm unaware of any such mechanisms that have been proven, so far, to exist in humans. But the jury is still out.
If such a thing IS found it will likely be either a bias or (if a near-100% thing) a recent mutation. A total or near-total bias toward one sex is likely to lead quickly to species extinction if not countered by some other factor.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well you generally have an equal number of X and Y sperm (while all eggs are X of course) its been shown that Y sperm die easier when conditions are harsh (acidity, not right temperature etc.) and are stronger when conditions are just right. So this affects the gender greatly. How brain-type affects gender is unknown but probably based on hormons levels which can change these conditions.
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.
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
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.
I was also kind of joking , though i think it was so dry that it evaporated .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The question, of course, is whether this is a reasonable interpretaiton of an objective set of data, or whether this is pseudostatistics where you start from a conclusion, and work backwards to find it in the numbers. Some questions I'd like to see addressed:
* How were the groupings into "masculine" and "feminine" professions done? Is this reasonable, and did they truly choose the most "obvious" masculine and feminine professions to include?
* Do these groupings span the dataset, or are some (possibly most) professions excluded as "neutral"?
* What is the breakdown by profession for all professions, not just the included groups?
* Most importantly, was the selection of the "masculine" and "feminine" professions determined BEFORE or AFTER the data was collected?
My concern here is that they started with a dataset for chilbirth for all professions (probably on a fairly small dataset). They noticed some professions skewed one way, some another. They noticed that some of the professions skewing male were "masculine" and some skewing female were "feminine" and called it a conclusion, sweeping all the other anomalites in their dataset under the rug. Hey, presto! Conclusion!
Fact: The general benchmark for "statistical significance" is 95% confidence that the data cannot be explained as a random phenomenon.
Experiment: Create 20 hypothetical correlations to test for on a completely random dataset. On average, you should find one in twenty hits the 95% confidence mark.
Intellectually dishonest followup: Publish your one statistically significant result with great fanfare. Bury the othe 19 in a footnote, if you mention them at all.
Step 3: Profit!
If this is indeed the case, it could provide an explaination for the results found.
"I've heard that before. But correlation does imply correlation."
n
Oh no it doesn't. And becide how do you know which way it works?
Perhaps having boys causes parents to go into engineering?
Or more likely some unknown 3rd factor causes both thing: boys and engineering. So there would be not causation between engineering and boys. (Meaning going into engineering would be useless.)
There are so many junk science reports that show correlation, but never show which way the causation goes. Which is the cause and which is the effect, lots of times they will pick one that sounds good to them, but never show any reason for it.
Here is a great example: http://news.google.com/news?q=gay+pheromones+brai
They for some reason asume that the changes in the brain cause a person to be gay.
But I would say it's quite the opposite - a person who chooses to be gay, acts gay, and his brain responds accordingly. It's well known that the brain will rewire itself depending on what you do with it. (For example if you play doom a lot you'll get better at it, i.e. brain will rewire itself. If you look for a certain gender to have sex with the brain will become better at enjoying that gender.)
If you start reading critically you'll find tons of these examples. Where "scientists" (not very good ones clearly) will just pick a cause and an efect to play up some conclusion that is important to them. Always ask: how do you know which is the cause and which is the effect. And if they say: it doesn't make sense the other way, or it's logically this way, laugh at them for being stupid.
-Ariel
We don't have alpha males any more? Since when? Visit a high school for a day. Go to the HQ of some mega corporation. Try to get into the porn business.
To me it sounds like you're saying we don't have alpha males in some sort of 'traditional' sense, but I'm not so sure there is such a thing.
You're nothing; like me.
I think that oftentimes we see too much a causes b, when it could be that some type of genetic language causes one to be predisposed to be an engineer, and that the same genetic language that causes one to be an engineer also causes one to have more boys.
A good example of this was a recent study about "nontraditional" names in the US (Da- prefixes, and -ius suffixes for example) led to lower academic performance, when it is more likely that kids with funky names do more poorly because parents who name kids funky names are more likely to be from a lower economic/educational strata
I am not sure if I am being clear, but I guess we just need to look at instead of A causes B, it could be C causes both A and B.
One a side note, by dad was sort of an early techie (Harvard grad (my sig is his quote), worked at Digital in the early 70's). He ended up in the defense industry, but on the business side (He calls me when he needs to open an attachment- lets just leave his current tech skill at that), however he still tells me every chance he gets that he was around at the dawn of the computer, you know fatherly stuff. (he does have some interesting stories about the hardware and software guys- the software guys used to be the low men on teh totem pole- not many people in those days thought software was ever going to be a money maker like hardware...). My point is, my dad was in astereotypical male role (tech/bus) and my mom is a college educated woman who stayed home with the kids- So did I have a 50-50 chance of being a male?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
In certain animals (including, perhaps, humans), the quality of diet has a correlation with the gender of offspring.
Or, to put it bluntly: Healthier females have more sons.
The explanation behind this is simple: Females have an excellent chance of breeding, regardless of health. In many species, however, the healthier males have a higher chance of breeding than weaker males. Evolution thus favors healthy females to have male children, and weaker females to have female children.
> Even at Harvard, someone must be at the bottom of the class. In fact, about half are below average.
That only holds for a bell curve. See my sig and think on it.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
My father is an artist ... my mother would have made a great programmer if she hadn't been a mother and they had computers back then. The result? I'm a female computer scientist! My daughter will probably wind up being a serious geek when she grows up, her father is a computer systems engineer.
I work in a large research environment and most people here that I know with kids have daughters. Could it be all that radiation?
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