This finding that women favor daughters and men favor sons, regardless of the socio-economic status of the household, could help explain the growing inequality in income and social mobility by gender. Conclusions of a team from Rutgers University (New Jersey) presented in Scientific Reports which seem to confirm the persistence from generation to generation, despite an egalitarian discourse, a certain sexism.
.jpg "PARENTING: Mothers favor their daughters, fathers their sons?")
But for the research team, it is above all a call to parents who should try to become aware of their unconscious prejudices with regard to their children. Lead author Lee Cronk, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, set out to test the 1973 Trivers-Willard sex distribution theory that parents invest more in children of the sex they will allow to obtain a maximum of descendants. Given that - as studies carried out in animals but also some in humans suggest - the reproductive success of daughters is not influenced by the social status of their mother, but the reproductive success of sons is positively correlated with the mother's social status,
Here, study participants were asked to complete a standard test that would elicit a sense of relative poverty or relative wealth. The researchers then assessed, in several ways, the participants' preferences for daughters and sons. Among other things, participants had the option of donating money to a charity supporting girls or boys. Another test made it possible to discreetly measure the attitudes of the participants. The axis of adoption was also mentioned to assess the preferences of the participants…
Parents tend to favor their children of the same sex? Although the experiment and its different modes of evaluation provide little support for the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, the sex of the participants seems to have an important impact on the sex they favor within their offspring. Women seem to prefer girls and invest more in their daughters than in their boys, while men seem to have a lower but significant preference for sons.
Results – questionable – but which could contribute to a better understanding of the growing inequality of income and intergenerational social mobility. Thus, the authors cite a recent study using tax data from 40 million Americans between 1996 and 2012 which suggests that the best predictor of lower intergenerational social mobility is having a single or divorced parent. Because most of these single parents are women – “and women prefer daughters” – this could explain this even lower intergenerational mobility for these sons of single (and more often poor) mothers.
Be that as it may, the study has the merit of raising parents' awareness of sexist prejudices of which they are not necessarily aware.
