For the past two years, it feels like every second friend of mine has been giving birth. And whenever the conversation turns to babies, one topic that always comes up is this: what’s happened to the girl/boy balance?


If I do a quick tally on my own circle of friends, there are six boys and 16 girls. My friend Cat, who lives in the UK, said she’d read somewhere that there are five girls for every boy being born (her fiancé obviously thinks this is brilliant news for their little boy). At my aqua aerobics class there is a blackboard on the wall listing the names of the babies born to the mums who attended the classes while they were pregnant. The boys list is consistently empty. We’re all having girls!

Apparently it’s a known issue in Arctic areas, thanks to the presence of man-made chemicals in the bloodstream of local women – the Guardian has reported a 2:1 ratio of girls to boys being born in Russia, Greenland and Canada. In one village in Greenland there were no boy babies at all. (Won’t *that* town be a dream destination for young men in about 20 years.)

The Guardian also reports: The sex balance of the human race - historically a slight excess of boys over girls - has recently begun to change. A paper published in the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences earlier this year said that in Japan and the US there were 250,000 boys fewer than would have been expected had the sex ratio existing in 1970 remained unchanged. The paper was unable to pin down a cause for the new excess of girls over boys.


I tried to find evidence of the same trend occurring in Australia but found none (though there do seem to be similar discussions taking place between American and Australian mums on the internet).

Are we heading for a serious man shortage in years to come?