You are gathering demographic data in a village. You suspect that families have a gender bias; that is, they have children until a certain target number of sons are born, but you don’t have direct evidence of this. All you have is information on the sex and birth order of each child born to each family in the village. How would you use the data to test your hypothesis that there is gender bias?

Question

You are gathering demographic data in a village.  You suspect that families have a gender bias; that is, they have children until a certain target number of sons are born, but you don’t have direct evidence of this.  All you have is information on the sex and birth order of each child born to each family in the village.  How would you use the data to test your hypothesis that there is gender bias?

Ms. Sue · Answer

You could see if there's a preponderance of girls among the younger children in each family.