In the natural course of things, roughly 105 males are born for every 100 females, an evolutionary response to higher male mortality. When ultrasound became cheap in the 1980s, parents gained a way to act on a preference for boys. The result was a massacre of female fetuses: roughly 50m fewer girls have been born since 1980 than would naturally be expected. In the worst year, 2000, around 1.7m more males were born than expected. As recently as 2015 the number of excess male births exceeded 1m.
By 2025 that figure is estimated to have fallen to about 200,000—a precipitous drop equating to roughly 7m girls saved since 2001. The global preference for sons has almost disappeared.
In South Korea almost 116 boys were born for every 100 girls in 1990. Among third-born children there were more than 200 boys for every 100 girls; among fourth-born the ratio approached 250 to 100. Today South Korea has a near-even sex distribution. The share of South Korean women who felt it "necessary" to have a son plunged from 48% in 1985 to 6% in 2003.
In China the sex ratio at birth fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 in 2024. Around 100,000 sex-selective abortions of female fetuses still take place each year.
In India the sex ratio at birth fell from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8 by 2025.
In Bangladesh, women who have not yet had children report an almost identical desire for sons and daughters; among those with one or two children, having a son increases the desire for daughters and vice versa. Researchers have observed a similar yen for balance in most of sub-Saharan Africa.
Nearly half of South Korean women now want daughters. Girls account for a clear majority of South Korean adoptions. In Japan the National Fertility Survey shows that in 1982, 48.5% of married couples wanting only one child preferred a daughter; by 2002, 75% did.
A pro-girl bias has been detected throughout Scandinavia. Studies have also suggested a preference for girls in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Portugal. In America, having a girl first is now associated with lower fertility rates among married couples, according to research by Francine Blau of Cornell University using data from 2008 to 2013—a reversal of a historical preference for sons documented by Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti using census data from 1960 to 2000.
Adoptive parents in America were willing to pay as much as $16,000 more to secure a daughter, according to a 2010 study. At fertility clinics in America, where sex-selective IVF is legal, parents increasingly opt for girls; 80% of couples using sperm-sorting to select a child's sex chose girls.
The growing desire for daughters may partly reflect social ills afflicting men in the rich world. Globally, 93% of prisoners are male. In rich countries 54% of young women have a tertiary degree, compared with 41% of young men. Boys trail girls at all stages of education and are expelled from school at far higher rates. They are less likely than women to attend university; the gender gap at American universities is bigger today than in 1972, when laws prohibiting gender discrimination in education were enacted—but it is no longer women who are underrepresented. Teenage boys are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of violent crimes, and more likely to commit suicide. Around one in five American men aged 25-34 lives with his parents, compared with just over one in ten women of the same age.
In Japan, large numbers of young recluses known as hikikomori, most of whom are men, have withdrawn from society entirely.
Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, observes: "We no longer have trophy wives. We have trophy kids."
Britain's Parliament opened an investigation into male underachievement in schools in 2024. Norway launched a Men's Equality Commission in 2022; its final report in 2024 concluded that tackling challenges for boys and men would be the "next step" in gender equality. In America, Utah's governor Spencer Cox (Republican) has created a task-force on male well-being; Maryland's governor Wes Moore (Democrat) has committed to "targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys"; Michigan's governor Gretchen Whitmer (Democrat) wants to get more young men into Michigan's colleges and vocational courses.
A Difficulty for Every Solution.