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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."
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
My wife was a nurse before becoming a teacher. So far we have 1 daughter.
So clearly I need to spend some more time at a computer if we're ever going to have a boy... oh, wait.
I think the real reason is some engineers even manage to scare off their own X sperm.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
Well, XX sperm would cause ill childs anyway (namely XXX womans, unlessa the egg cell has an anomaly itself).
:-)
However, solving equations of course favours Y chromosomes. That's because you always solve after X, so you have its actual value and therefore can eliminate it. Eliminating X of course doesn't affect sperms with an Y chromosome (because it doesn't have an X to eliminate), but only sperms with an X chromosome (after all, x is exactly what you eliminate).
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
Have you ever wondered why fat parents have fat children? Or why Chinese parents have Chinese children? It's no coincidence.
No no, OS X favors girls, Linux/UNIX (excluding OS X) favors boys, windows favors inbreeding.
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.
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.
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.
Short people, if they switch to being tall, can improve their chances of having tall children.
Engineers aren't in their profession by accidentally not becoming nurses or teachers. I would have to state with fair certainty that one who becomes a nurse is probably - on the average, or even in the majority of cases - not of an engineering mind, personality, etc. And the reverse. The profession, statistically, would likely be an indicator of personality type in these rather extreme cases of the nurse versus the engineer. I know several nurses and teachers and a lot of engineers. They are rather opposites. The idea of the nurses or music teachers I know "switching" to engineering is flat-out absurd. While I won't rule out the possibility of the contribution of the professional environment to the children's sex determination, how deep the correlation goes is unknown. But it seems to me that statistically, the profession is only evidence of something far, far deeper.
must... stay... awake...
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.
Maybe you generate more girls if you spend a big chunk of your day standing and walking around.
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 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.
>BTW, what about Emacs and vi
;)
I don't think their users breed enough to make good statistics
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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