14 DAY TRIAL // A new study conducted by Dutch researchers comes to unearth a surprising and fascinating link between the status of the expectant mother and whether she will have a boy or a girl, the Daily Mail reports. According to the findings, rich women or those in a position of power are more likely to have baby boys, as opposed to those who rank lower on the social scale.
Women have no control over the gender of their unborn baby. However, as the Mail also points out, unborn baby girls are believed to be stronger than boys, which considerably decreases the chances of a miscarriage in conditions of stress or, say, unhealthy nutrition. Moreover, the study has now established that women who are poor or who occupy an inferior social position are more likely to give birth to girls rather than sickly boys or boys who would not be equipped to face competition from other males.
“According to evolutionary theory, when conditions are good, and babies are likely to be healthy, a mother’s best chance of passing on her genes to another generation is to have boys. Fit, healthy boys will see off rivals and can potentially father hundreds of children, ensuring the survival of the family line. But if a mother is unfit or malnourished, a baby boy is a poor investment. A weak, sickly male is unlikely to beat off competition from other males and may not become a father or even survive. In these circumstances it makes more evolutionary sense to have a girl who does not face competition to become pregnant to continue the family line.” the Mail writes, based on the findings of the recent study.
In order to come to this conclusion, the Dutch researchers relied on a database of 95,000 Rwandan mothers compiled in 2002. Then, they compared the boy-girl ratio to the mother’s marital status, believed to be the best indicator as to her financial situation and social position, and health. Rwanda allows men to be polygamous, which means that a lower-ranking wife enjoys the least social and financial benefits of married life, as opposed to a higher-ranking one.
At the end of the study, researchers were able to determine that women from the lower ranks had mostly girls, whereas higher-ranking wives gave birth mostly to boys. “Higher-ranking wives tend to have more influence, and income, than lower ranking ones. And the more wives a man has, the less food and money there is to share. As expected, lower ranking wives produced more daughters on average than the higher ranking wives or the women in monogamous marriages, the researchers report in the journal Biology Letters.” the Mail explains.