2025/07/18 by Siwen Wang, Bernard Rosner, Hongyan Huang +5 · 2 voices · 5 citations
Mathematics · Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Biology #Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences #Demography #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Genetics #Logistic regression #Mathematics #Odds #Odds ratio #Offspring #Population #Pregnancy #Reproductive Health and Technologies #Sex ratio #Statistics
paper · doi:10.1126/sciadv.adu7402
published in Science Advances 11(29), eadu7402 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)
openalex publication_date 2025/07/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/12
Some families consistently have offspring of only one sex, raising questions about whether sex at birth is truly random. This study investigated whether offspring sex follows a simple binomial distribution within families and identified maternal factors associated with unisexual sibships. We analyzed 58,007 US women with two or more singleton live births (146,064 pregnancies, 1956–2015). Offspring sex followed a beta-binomial rather than a simple binomial distribution, indicating that each family may have a unique probability of male or female births, akin to a weighted coin toss. Deviations from simple binomial distribution were more pronounced when we excluded each woman’s last birth to reduce the influence of sex-based stopping behavior. After excluding the last birth, older maternal age at first birth was associated with higher odds of having offspring of only one sex. A genome-wide association study identified maternal SNPs linked to having female-only ( NSUN6 ) and male-only ( TSHZ1 ) offspring. Our findings suggest maternal factors influence offspring sex distributions.