A girl or a boy? 9 in 10 parents know their child’s sex
before it is born

Authors: Olivia Samuel (Université Paris Nanterre/Cresppa), Carole Brugeilles (Université Paris Nanterre/Cresppa), Christine Hamelin (Université Versailles St Quentin/Printemps - INED), Anne Paillet (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CESSP), Agnès Pélage (Université de Créteil/Printemps)

Asking to know the sex of an unborn child has become a norm with which just 1 in 10 couples do not wish to comply. In the past, parents did not discover the sex of their child until it was born. Today, who are the parents who do not ask to know, and why?

The ELFE child cohort study¹ (Étude longitudinale française depuis l’enfance) provides us, for the first time in France, with nationwide data on this question drawn from a large, representative sample of births in 2011. These data show that asking to know the child’s sex beforehand is a common practice: 89% of mothers and 84% of fathers reported doing so. While the practice is widespread, some significant variations are nonetheless discernible.

A stronger propensity to ask among young parents expecting a first child
Among mothers aged under 25 (who represented 14% of the cohabiting couples), 97% asked about the child’s sex versus 92% at ages 25–29 and 89% at ages 30 and over. But the youngest women were also more often those expecting their first child, and being a first-time parent is also associated with a slightly higher propensity to ask: 92.5% versus 90% among parents who already have one or more children, for whom the desire to know depends partly on the sex of the existing child or children. When parents of two children had two boys or two girls, they were more likely to ask than when they already had a boy and a girl.

Variations according to educational level and religious practice
Asking about the child’s sex becomes less frequent as educational level increases. The proportion of highly educated couples (15%) who did not want to know their child’s sex before the birth is 3 times higher than among low-educated couples (5%). This variation by educational level may be due to social differences in attitudes to the medicalization of pregnancy, in the propensity to challenge dominant social norms, in the desire to be seen as having distinctive practices, or in the tolerance of uncertainty. For example, highly educated couples have a stronger tendency to distance themselves from the numerous social injunctions to prepare for the birth on the basis of the child’s sex. 

The mothers and, to a lesser extent, the fathers who regularly attend religious services asked to know the sex of the child much less often than the others.

A modest effect of pregnancy follow-up
Parents were slightly more likely to learn the child’s sex during pregnancy follow-up. When the woman benefited from a large number of antenatal consultations (12 or more) or scans (five or more), couples slightly more frequently asked to know the child’s sex.

¹ELFE (Étude longitudinale française depuis l’enfance) follows a sample of 18,300 families who had a child in 2011, and regularly asks them questions from the time the child was born until adulthood.

Published on: 20/12/2023