Women favour daughters while men favour sons

Washington D.C. [USA], Nov 13 (ANI): According to a recent study, women prefer and invest more in daughters, while men favour and invest more in their sons.
The study appeared in the Journal of Scientific Reports and was carried out by the Rutgers University.
"Our research may help people be better parents if we become aware of our unconscious biases towards different kinds of children," said senior author Lee Cronk, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
For the gender bias study, researchers conducted an online experiment to test the 1973 Trivers-Willard hypothesis, which predicted that wealthy parents would prefer and invest in sons, while poor parents would invest and favour daughters.
Participants completed a task that, based on previous research, fosters feelings of relative poverty or relative wealth.
Then the researchers measured participants' preferences for daughters and sons in several ways. They included an opportunity to pledge money to a charity that largely supports girls or boys, a test that discretely measures participants' attitudes, gauging preferences for the sex of children they might adopt, and assessing the sex ratio they would prefer in their own offspring.
While the experiment yielded little support for the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, the participants' sex had a strong impact on what sexes they preferred for their offspring. Females strongly preferred daughters and investing in them, while males had a weaker though still significant preference for sons.
"These results may also have implications for rising income inequality and intergenerational social mobility," the study said.
"A recent study using the tax records of 40 million Americans between 1996 and 2012 showed that the single best predictor of lower intergenerational social mobility was having a single or divorced parent. Because most of these single parents are females, and females prefer daughters, we might expect even lower reduced intergenerational mobility for the sons of these single mothers," the study highlighted. (ANI)