The Economist: The stunning decline of the preference for having boys [full article in comments]

gratis_eekhoorn · 2025-06-08T18:48:33+00:00

this article belongs in r/everydaymisandry aswell

flaumo · 2025-06-08T18:09:55+00:00

the harms caused by surplus men

Men as damaged goods, that can, sadly, not be returned to sender.

Parents are not aborting boys for being boys.

No, but in the case of in vitro fertilization, they simply do not get implanted, but frozen. Hardly better.

Findol272 · 2025-06-08T17:50:00+00:00

a mostly female world would be more peaceful and better run.

They're saying the quiet part out loud.

Interesting article despite the heavy slant.

uncertainty_47 · 2025-06-08T20:55:03+00:00

Men are still over-represented at the top, in boardrooms, but also at the bottom, angrily shutting themselves in their bedrooms.

I hate this comparison because it makes people think the two groups are equivalent when there are several orders of magnitude more men in the bottom group than the top. This whole focus on 'too many men in the boardroom' perpetually distracts from the numbers which are that millions of men of are struggling while only thousands see outsized success.

(That focus also ignores male traits like competitiveness, and their willingness to work longer hours that many would see as prerequisites for top-tier roles in business, but that's an aside here)

Slave-Moralist · 2025-06-08T16:54:24+00:00

The stunning decline of the preference for having boys

Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean towards them

Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.

The fading of boy preference in regions where it was strongest has been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even. In China it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 last year, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in 1990.

In 2010 an Economist cover called the mass abortion of girls “gendercide”. The global decline of this scourge is a blessing. First, it implies an ebbing of the traditions that underpinned it: the stark belief that men matter more and the expectation in some cultures that a daughter will grow up to serve her husband’s family, so parents need a son to look after them in old age. Such sexist ideas have not vanished, but evidence that they are fading is welcome.

Second, it heralds an easing of the harms caused by surplus men. Sex-selective abortion doomed millions of males to lifelong bachelorhood. Many of these “bare branches”, as they are known in China, resented it intensely. And their fury was socially destabilising, since young, frustrated bachelors are more prone to violence. One study of six Asian countries found that warped sex ratios led to an increase of rape in all of them. Others linked the imbalance to a rise in violent crime in China, along with authoritarian policing to quell it, and to a heightened risk of civil strife or even war in other countries. The fading of boy preference will make much of the world safer.

In some regions, meanwhile, a new preference is emerging: for girls. It is far milder. Parents are not aborting boys for being boys. No big country yet has a noticeable surplus of girls. Rather, girl preference can be seen in other measures, such as polls and fertility patterns. Among Japanese couples who want only one child, girls are strongly preferred. Across the world, parents typically want a mix. But in America and Scandinavia couples are likelier to have more children if their early ones are male, suggesting that more keep trying for a girl than do so for a boy. When seeking to adopt, couples pay extra for a girl. When undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other sex-selection methods in countries where it is legal to choose the sex of the embryo, women increasingly opt for daughters.

People prefer girls for all sorts of reasons. Some think they will be easier to bring up, or cherish what they see as feminine traits. In some countries they may assume that looking after elderly parents is a daughter’s job.

However, the new girl preference also reflects increasing worries about boys’ prospects. Boys have always been more likely to get into trouble: globally, 93% of jailbirds are male. In much of the world they have also fallen behind girls academically. In rich countries 54% of young women have a tertiary degree, compared with 41% of young men. Men are still over-represented at the top, in boardrooms, but also at the bottom, angrily shutting themselves in their bedrooms.

Governments are rightly concerned about boys’ problems. Because boys mature later than girls, there is a case for holding them back a year at school. More male teachers, especially at primary school, where there are hardly any, might give them role models. Better vocational training might nudge them into jobs that men have long avoided, such as nursing. Tailoring policies to help struggling boys need not mean disadvantaging girls, any more than prescribing glasses for someone with bad eyesight hurts those with 20/20 vision.

In the future, technology will offer parents more options. Some will be relatively uncontroversial: when it is possible to tweak genes to avoid horrific hereditary diseases, those who can will not hesitate to do so. But what if new technologies for sex selection become widespread? Couples undergoing fertility treatment can already choose sperm with X chromosomes or determine an embryo’s sex via genetic testing. Such techniques are expensive and rare, but will surely get cheaper.

Also, and more important, more parents who conceive children the old-fashioned way are likely to use cheap, blood-based screening in the first weeks of pregnancy to find out about genetic traits. These tests can already reveal the sex of the embryo. Some people trying for a girl may then use pill-based abortifacients to avoid having a boy. As a liberal newspaper, The Economist would prefer not to tell people what kind of family they should have. Nonetheless, it is worth pondering what the consequences might be if a new imbalance were to arise: a future generation with substantially more women than men. The power of numbers

It would not be as bad as too many men. A surplus of single women is unlikely to become physically abusive. Indeed, you might speculate that a mostly female world would be more peaceful and better run. But if women were ever to make up a large majority, some men might exploit their stronger bargaining position in the mating market by becoming more promiscuous or reluctant to commit themselves to a relationship. For many heterosexual women, this would make dating harder. Some wanting to couple up would be unable to do so.

Celebrate the cooling of the war on baby girls, therefore, and urge on the day when it ends entirely. But do not assume that what comes next will be simple or trouble-free.

SprooseGoose94 · 2025-06-09T07:35:04+00:00

Idk, this article just kinda seems like a society wide admission that society has been shit at, everyone is currently still shit at raising men, and are just going for the other option instead of trying to get better at raising them.

Preferring girls cos they're "easier to raise" is exactly that no? I must admit, it must be pretty disheartening to see/hear/realise that society itself has kinda just given up on you

Franksss · 2025-06-08T19:11:12+00:00

I do find the idea as it's highlighted of men being more promiscuous as a negative for women, but it wouldn't really fly to suggest the opposite, despite it being just as true.

helloiseeyou2020 · 2025-06-08T19:56:36+00:00

The bigoted and gender essentialist things this person felt comfortable saying about boys and men - and the fact that they were completely right to feel comfortable saying them - are stunningly despicable. Overshadowed by that is the shocking lack of discussing the unmet needs of boys and young men as problems in of themselves. Absolutely everything is framed by how it affects women.

She talks about young men like they are subhuman. It feels as though the Econ had undeniable trends to write about and assigned it to their most misandrist writer to ensure the implications were shaped and softened appropriately.

KobeBean · 2025-06-09T11:24:45+00:00

Is it really stunning? Parents are simply responding to the preferential bias toward women and girls at every life stage from birth until retirement. If blue eyes resulted in better treatment through childhood, there’d be article after article about parents doing IVF for blue eyes.

Controlled-Alternare · 2025-06-09T00:52:03+00:00

I wonder where all the "misandry isn't real" types are when it comes to articles like this?

Local-Willingness784 · 2025-06-09T01:22:20+00:00

i genuily dont think anything can be done if we have reached this level of normalised hate, its like being male is a disease that they have to purge out of the gene pool and the system on top of being disgustingly obnoxious and girlboss/pop feminist about it, its like they are declaring almost genocidal takes with the same smile they talk about "emotionally intelligent"men or "babygirs" on tiktok or some stupid new trend.

The nonchalance is really what makes it worse and I don't even know what to say about it....

Adventurous_Design73 · 2025-06-09T12:39:35+00:00

Sexist misandrist article

Ruh_Roh- · 2025-06-08T22:05:35+00:00

As a man, I think it's better for males if there are less of them. I don't feel sad for unborn males. I hope the population gets completely skewed so there's 20 girls for every boy. Then men will finally have value and not be treated like disposable garbage.

Adventurous_Design73 · 2025-06-09T12:40:58+00:00

u/Slave-Moralist please use an archive link for articles like this instead of giving them views and clicks

flaumo · 2025-06-11T08:02:24+00:00

BTW in this post there is a graph of the changing preferences https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1l74klt/oc_the_stunning_decline_of_the_preference_for/

smushedbananas · 2025-06-14T15:31:25+00:00

I'm so confused by the outrage over this article. Nowhere does this article say that men are hated. The article states that femicide and the aborting of girls have decreased (although there are still far more men than women in those countries). All other "evidence" of preference is merely anecdotal at best -- nor is there any evidence that people are aborting boys or killing them after birth due to the gender (compare to femicide).

It seems that many comments saw the title and assumed that "decline of the preference for having boys" means that people don't want to have boys, when in actuality, the article is describing the reduction in aborting girls and femicide throughout the world. In other words, it appears that gender preferences are becoming more equal. Believe it or not, the decrease in hatred for women is not a disadvantage to boys.

Title	The Economist: The stunning decline of the preference for having boys [full article in comments]
Author	Slave-Moralist
Upvotes	161
Comments	73
Date	June 8, 2025 4:54 PM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1l6gvr1/the_economist_the_stunning_decline_of_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/the-economist-the-stunning-decline-of-the.1554257 https://theredarchive.com/post/1554257

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The stunning decline of the preference for having boys