Married Couples With Daughters Are More Likely To Divorce

Marriages in the United States producing firstborn daughters are more likely to end in divorce than those producing firstborn sons. It’s been generally assumed that this is evidence of fathers’ preference for a son. Scientists have recently published a study in the journal Demography that challenges the conventional belief.

The study– co-authored by Duke University economist Amar Hamoudi and University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Jenna Nobles— suggests that female embryos are actually hardier in the womb, and therefore more likely to reach full term if the expectant mother is in a stressful relationship. ‘Girls may well be surviving stressful pregnancies that boys can’t survive,’ Hamoudi said in a press release. ‘Thus, girls are more likely to be born into marriages that were already strained.’

The researchers based their research on longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents from 1979 to 2010– the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79).