Do you also find this article by ‘The Economist’ terribly sexist?

Author Dimitra Letsa

Published on: 07/02/2021

I started the Sunday reading by checking my newsfeed: as I follow ‘The Economist’, I got the suggestion for this article that was promoted by them on Linkedin: ‘Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons‘, under the category ‘Technology and Science’.

My first reaction was of course ‘WHAT?’ Can this really be true? And if it is, wouldn’t a headline like ‘Does the child’s sex play a role in parents’ divorce?’ , or ‘how parents’ sexist mentality can result to a divorce’ be more balanced than going straight into accusing daughters for their parents’ divorce in the ‘Science’ section of the publication?

So, I braced myself and started reading the article in order to see if it was just an unfortunate headline, or if things were even worse. Unfortunately, they were:

“Daughters have long been linked with divorce. Several studies conducted in America since the 1980s provide strong evidence that a couple’s first-born being a girl increases the likelihood of their subsequently splitting up. At the time, the researchers involved speculated that this was an expression of “son preference”, a phenomenon which, in its most extreme form, manifests itself as the selective abortion or infanticide of female offspring”

So, the ‘scientific’ headline is backed up by ‘several’ studies, of unmentioned researchers who speculate on the likelihood of reasons for a divorce of couples with daughters, and with no reference to the methodology of the said researches. 

If you have the patience of reading further down, through equally not so scientifically solid quotes, you reach to this statement:

”Taken over the years, the daughter effect, though real, is small. In the Netherlands, by the time their first-born is 18, 20.12% of couples will have divorced if that child is a son, compared with 20.48% if she is a daughter—an increase in probability of 1.8%”

That makes me wonder: does this marginal difference (even if we accept that the surveys -on the methodology, trustworthiness and accuracy of which we get zero information- were impeccably conducted), justify the statement that the ‘female first-born does indeed increase the risk of that child’s parents divorcing, in both America and the Netherlands’ and, overall, the headline and approach of the article?

My personal conclusion is:

if there is a story to be written here, this should have been about:

a) how and why these researches were conducted and if they are indeed accurate

b) how parents, of any sex, need to get better trained and educated in understanding and upbringing their daughters;

instead it is unfortunately an article blaming daughters for their parents’ divorce…

Oh, and if you are brave enough to read to the end, you get as a recommended reading the same article, but with an other ‘catchy’ title ‘SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Daughters provoke parental strife’. And if you haven’t had enough already, you can proceed to ‘The Economist’s’ daughter (pun intended) publication ‘1843’ and read about how ‘It’s a boy thing: data suggest that couples who have sons are more likely to stay together than those that don’t’.

I am not surprised; articles like these were the driving force behind Moonshot news.

But I strongly believe that ‘The Economist’ management needs to consider a better unconscious biases and diversity training for their staffers; Zanny Minton Beddoes, the first woman to hold the Editor-in-Chief position in the publication, has still a lot of work to do…