the times | Friday August 7 2020 2GM 19
News
In 1950 Doris Day sang of her family
plans “A boy for you, a girl for me... how
happy we would be”.
Now statistics show that around that
time, for perhaps the first time in
history, the world started to share her
sentiment — striving in greater num-
bers for families that had “one of each”.
An analysis of half a million Britons
born between 1940 and 1970 has found
that there are fewer families than might
be expected in which all the siblings are
male or all are female, and more in
which the last sibling is a different sex
from those who came before.
The effect is slight but persistent,
implying that at least 1 in 40 parents in
1940 resolved to keep having children
until they had both sexes, rising to 1 in
20 in 1970. If based entirely on chance
it would be expected that 63,000 fami-
lies would have only sons, when the
study found that there were fewer than
61,000. For families with only daugh-
ters, the expectation would be 64,500,
when there were about 64,000.
The study also looked at Dutch fami-
lies over 300 years and found a similar
pattern — but it only appeared after the
Second World War. The findings imply
that because girls came to be regarded
as of equal value to boys, a minority of
families decide to keep getting larger in
the hope of getting both sexes.
Jianzhi Zhang, a scientist at the Uni-Parents won’t stop till
they have one of each
Tom Whipple Science Editor
Tom Ballversity of Michigan and father of two
boys, conducted the research expecting
the opposite result.
When he looked at the data on sib-
lings held by the UK Biobank, a record
of hundreds of thousands of middle-
aged Britons, he was surprised. Far
from implying that some people were
genetically programmed to have one
sex over another, it suggested that they
socially programmed their families.
Sara, 38, from Stroud in Gloucester-
shire, said she always wanted a girl but
had to wait four pregnancies before she
got one and was “over the moon” when
she finally gave birth to a daughter last
year. “I was obviously delighted to have
my sons as well but I’d wanted a little
girl from the off, since when I first
decided to be a mum,” she said.
Mr Zhang wondered if parents chose
family size in part on the basis of com-
position rather than numbers. When he
looked at the data for a study in the
journal Current Biology he found that
that was exactly what appeared to be
going on. Terming it “coupon collecting
behaviour”, in reference to a probability
theory centred on coupon collectors
who want one of each type, he said it
suggested an important societal shift.
“In traditional societies people gen-
erally think sons have a higher utility
than daughters. Only if gender equality
improves, and you have an apprecia-
tion of gender diversity, can you see the
popularity of coupon collection behav-
iour emerge,” he said.TMS
[email protected] | @timesdiaryGower wants
another run
Scandalously ditched from Sky’s
cricket team, David Gower hopes to
reinvent himself as a mixture of
Michael Palin and Jeremy Clarkson.
Gower is trying to persuade TV
producers to make a film of him
retracing a road trip he took as a
child in 1963, when the Gowers
drove their new Ford Anglia from
their home in Dar-Es-Salaam,
through the Serengeti and across to
Cape Town before sailing back to
Blighty. “Every 20 miles the roof
rack would fall off and I would learn
a few more words of Anglo Saxon,”
Gower, above, told an evening with
the Royal College of Medicine. He
does not intend to take Ian Botham,
his old pal, with him, saying there
wouldn’t be enough space in the car
for Lord Beefy’s wine requirements.Ed Sheeran and Ben Stokes should
beware if invited by the writer
Elizabeth Day to a recording of her
How to Fail podcast at her home.
Her cat, Huxley, likes to take centre
stage. “He sometimes jumps up on
the table as we’re recording,” she
says. “He loves men with ginger facial
hair. Presumably because he’s ginger
and thinks they look like him.”arsenal man’s torture
As a famous Arsenal fan, the author
Nick Hornby struggles to keep on
good terms with supporters of the
club’s great rivals, Tottenham
Hotspur. He is, however, careful to
appease one Spurs fan in his life: his
dentist, with whom he has a strained
relationship, especially when Spurs
are doing better. “It’s like Marathon
Man,” Hornby tells the Penguin
Podcast. In that 1976 film, Laurence
Olivier uses dentistry to torture
Dustin Hoffman; Hornby’s man has
a less gruesome, if just as painful,
method. “I have to open my mouth,”
Hornby says, “and listen to him.”conversational bombshell
On the 75th anniversary of the
United States dropping the first
atomic bomb on Japan, the military
historian Allan Mallinson recalled
being at a formal dinner at our
embassy in Tokyo in 1995. Placed
next to a Japanese admiral, hedeployed the traditional opening
gambit and asked his neighbour
which city he came from.
“Hiroshima,” the admiral replied
curtly. Mallinson suddenly found
himself lost for words, so the
admiral helpfully added: “It’s a large
city about 500 miles west of here.”It reminds me of when my grandpa’s
Lions club visited Germany on the
50th anniversary of the war ending
and one of his friends was asked by
their host if he had visited Dresden
before. There was an awful pause
before the man carefully said: “Not as
such, but I did fly above it once.”mps’ wedding day hitch
Among the tens of thousands of
couples whose wedding plans have
been ruined this summer are two
Tory MPs. Esther McVey and Philip
Davies, the MPs for Tatton and
Shipley, are supposed to marry next
month. The guest list has already
been cut down from several pages
to just 30 names, and even that is
not currently allowed, which means
that McVey has had to cancel the
Gospel choir she wanted. “I say to
Philip that maybe the big guy in the
sky is trying to tell us something,
maybe this is my big escape,”
McVey says. “But Philip doesn’t
appreciate my humour.”patrick kidd