Beautiful Women More Likely to Have Daughters

Added by admin on December 1, 2010

Beautiful women are more likely than their plainer looking counterparts to give birth to girls, a new study reports.

The results of the study, led by Dr Satoshi Kanazawa at the London School of Economics, will be published in the journal Reproductive Sciences. Dr Kanazawa used a survey of 17,000 babies born in Britain in March 1958.

The babies were tracked throughout their lives; at age seven their teachers would rate their attractiveness, and at the age of 45 they were asked about the gender of any children they had given birth to.

The findings showed that those rated attractive were equally likely to have a son or a daughter as their first-born, but those that were rated unattractive were more likely to have a son.

Dr Kanazawa said that parents often produce children who will benefit from their own tributes; since beauty is more beneficial to a woman than it is to a man, he argued, it would pay for an attractive woman to give birth to a daughter.

Another similar study of 2,000 Americans found that women are becoming more and more beautiful with every generation, because attractive women have more children and they are more likely to be girls.

However, a study of People magazine’s list of the 50 most beautiful people for the years 1995-2000, showed that the featured celebrities were more likely to have sons, according to Andrew Geltman at Columbia University.