Baby Girl First, Divorce May be Next

    If your first child is a girl you’re more like to divorce than if your first baby is a boy, according to a study produced by Dr. Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Dr. Gordon Dahl, professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego.

Their report, “The Demand for Sons,” appeared in a recent edition of “The Review of Economic Studies.”  “Your divorce rate increases approximately four percent if you have a daughter as a first child instead of a son,” Moretti said recently.  

So what happens if a woman has three daughters and no boys? Does her chance of divorce triple? “We don’t know what the effects of having multiple girls might be. We did compare families who had two daughters with families that had two sons. What we discovered was that a couple with two daughters is more likely to have a third child trying to have a son,” Moretti explained.  

Asked whether there is a difference in the divorce rate between various races or ethnicities that have a daughter first, the Berkeley economics professor said, “We don’t believe there is any difference between races, but it’s hard to compare divorce rates across races.”  

At the same time, Moretti said, “Women whose first child is a boy are four percent more likely to remain married than those whose first child is a girl. In general, the better the woman’s education, the later the fertility the lower the divorce rate.”  

In the preface to their 50-page study on gender and divorce Moretti and Dahl contend, “Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with their father compared to a first-born son.”  

They found three reasons for this:

1. Women who have daughters first are less likely to be married.
2. Parents with first born daughters are more likely to be divorced..
3. Fathers are more likely to obtain custody of a son than a daughter.  

“The effect is quantitatively substantial, accounting for a 3.1 percent lower probability of a resident father for families with a first-born girl. We estimate that in any given year (in the U.S.) roughly 52,000 first-born daughters under the age of 12 would have had a resident father if they had been boys,” the report says.