Maternal Dominance Hypothesis

[rainbowflower]

perhaps dominant personalities also have high stress levels, and the stress hormones are known to lower fertility. Studies have shown that those women with high-stress careers (which included being a stay at home mum!) have more daughters too.

[begonia]

Rainbow are you talking about this stress study? BMC Public Health | Full text | Mother's occupation and sex ratio at birth

It did show SAHM as "stressed" at 8 of 10 but also used it as a 2 out of 10, since it is such a subjective category (personally my SAHM life is FAR less stressed than my career) ... I thought it was interesting though that no matter how they rated SAHM, the study outcome wasn't really changed. The numbers of SAHM in their sample were apparently pretty small.

Then there was another one I remember from this fall that only had like, 330 women, but measured their cortisol and adrenaline levels around ovulation, and those with high cortisol (associated with stress) had daughters.

I think the link between dominance and testosterone is strong though; and in times of chronic stress (war, famine, etc) women's testosterone has been shown to rise. Studies that look at that show more boys born during/post a period of chronic stress, so in that situation, stress would sway boy. Some of Grant's work (on MDH) also looks at the idea that, since TW indicates dominance usually includes access to resources, the dominant have less stress since they DO have access to resources, and in that situation, they have boys. Which, in conjunction with the other study, to me makes sense since the women with high cortisol were typically concerned about job/financial pressures (according to questionnaires they filled out during the study), and providing for their families. Concerns such as that would indicate not being in an environment of plenty, which would then (according to TW) lead to daughters. And in that study, it did.

It seems like from the variety of studies on it stress is such a tricky one! I think the type and duration of stress (and the mother's personal reaction to it) is key to how stress impacts the ratio.

Anyhow for me I'm not sure I'll ever be able to figure out WHY I personally have daughters. I can't find anything that I'm like, AH-HA! That makes sense! It seems like so many swayers feel like they "fit" the boy/girl mom category and I just don't. I can't figure out what to change if I was to sway again and it makes me feel like I need to give up on the having a son thing.

[zanacal]

The fact that you can't stop analysing the facts and doing your research fits in with the 'boy mum' image begonia! I don't know the answer (obviously). I find how dominant I am changes the older I get (and the more children I have!) - both those things make me less likely to want to control everything and more likely to go with the flow and let things go. Maybe this is why we've seen a few ladies with a girl after 3 boys lately - you can't even pretend you're in control with my 3 little monsters!

I would hypothesis that sperm count has a lot to do with it - but you had multiple attempts in your fertile window and I guess your DH was taking supplements and so on and if your DH's count was on the lower end of normal, I wonder whether you would keep getting pregnant quite so quickly? It's sh!t luck I think honey.

[begonia]

The fact that you can't stop analysing the facts and doing your research fits in with the 'boy mum' image begonia! I don't know the answer (obviously). I find how dominant I am changes the older I get (and the more children I have!) - both those things make me less likely to want to control everything and more likely to go with the flow and let things go. Maybe this is why we've seen a few ladies with a girl after 3 boys lately - you can't even pretend you're in control with my 3 little monsters!

I would hypothesis that sperm count has a lot to do with it - but you had multiple attempts in your fertile window and I guess your DH was taking supplements and so on and if your DH's count was on the lower end of normal, I wonder whether you would keep getting pregnant quite so quickly? It's sh!t luck I think honey.

LOL Zan You make me smile about the can't pretend you're in control with the little monsters! We've certainly not tested DH's sperm count but yes .. every single pregnancy (3) has been OHW for us. Odds are he's probably fine?

And I agree really ... on some level it just comes down to a large part luck, and I HATE luck I can't control LUCK for crying out loud

It's funny too because part of me doesn't even want to consider IVF/PGD because there's an element to this that I know, for me, is PROVING that I can conceive a son, KWIM? I am so ridiculous.

[Out of the Blue]

And I agree really ... on some level it just comes down to a large part luck, and I HATE luck I can't control LUCK for crying out loud

It's funny too because part of me doesn't even want to consider IVF/PGD because there's an element to this that I know, for me, is PROVING that I can conceive a son, KWIM? I am so ridiculous.

OMG, B...Zan is right...You are SUCH a mom! I can feel the T coursing though your post, lol.

[nuthinbutpink]

Begonia- I am a "boy" mom through and through. I have never been, am not now a girly, girl. I was writing on that karma thread a bit ago and there is a quote from Steve Jobs that says you cannot connect the dots looking forward, only at the end when you look back can you connect them and see how you ended up where you are.

I have learned lately dealing with my DD's issues that things that happen to me, when life happens, it just makes me who I am. Through her issues, I have learned to have more empathy towards families with special needs children and I think I would have looked past them before or at least not stopped and said hi when I saw them. Things that happen to us, people that come in and out of our lives just make us the person we are destined to be. There just is no other explanation for it. No reason why. It's just life.

[XXdreaming]

you know sometimes I wonder if you can be too much of a boy mom or girl mom so therefore your body(or universe or God whatever you believe) feels like you need to be leveled out some, so you get the opposite lol, I have a family member that is very boyish, she actually prefers boys clothes, but she had 4 girls and oh my has she learned alot about girls, her girls are girly girl and her oldest is 12yr now and is giving her mom lessons on how to be a girl lol, painting her nails and doing her toes, I find it very funny lol and then theres the girly girl moms who for the 1st time in their life got muddy with her boys (to only run real quick to clean up becuase even though it was fun it was gross lol I dont know if I would do it again lol) I dont know but it is weird though how you can be surprised to find someone had so many girls or boys when its the complete opposite of their personality

[lindi]

Begonia, you were wondering about in IVF shouldn't the gender split be weighted towards one side or the other if the egg priming thing has any merit... well, if you look at the girls doing IVF it really does seem that they get more embryos of the gender they already have!
I am so much a "boy mom" from the MDH, the personality, the hormonal make-up and yet I had a pretty even gender split with my embryos. (I did however do the low-everything diet for a good portion of the 3 months before I did IVF where my eggs were developing...not on purpose for IVF I was going to sway).
Dr H and I think another RE- Dr Sher was it? think the sperm have a lot to do with it. It could be that most of the time dominant women attract a kind of man where the Y are more dominant in getting to the egg... it really could be all about the man, who knows. Its crazymaking.

[atomic sagebrush]

I'm totally pulling my hair out lately over this stuff, because it absolutely drives me nuts. Like Envisioned mentioned everything I read points to my having boys. Even the diet and fertility things; we get pg just by winking at each other In all honesty I believe a large part of the reason I have such a hard time with having girls (when I always saw myself with boys) is that truly my very nature (see Maternal Dominance Hypoth) is geared more towards raising sons, hence why having daughters feels so ... unnatural to me.

And yet here I am, pregnant with DD3. I don't get it. And I don't feel like I can possibly try a 4th time because if everything says I should have sons, yet I still have 3 DD, how on earth can I believe for a second that my next child would be a boy? It's tough, because I'd like to believe that I *can* produce a son, especially given how I can't find a single bit of research to the contrary. Yet my personal experience is that even with much in my favor, I can't. Granted I've tried only 3 times not 10, but I also don't see how if my coin is supposedly weighted to blue, I wouldn't have had one by now. But enough about my personal situation since after all, I'm one person, and studies look at far more than that .. clearly I'm either an outlier or completely incorrect about myself.

I have a couple of questions on MDH ...one thing I wonder about is why, if supposedly the woman's biology primes the egg for X or Y prior to conception, things like sperm spinning still have a good success rate... at least for girls, it's pretty high though certainly not close to 100%. And IVF ... not that I know a ton about that (I am sure others can offer insight here) ... wouldn't the eggs retrieved from the same cycle lean heavily towards being fertilized by mostly X or mostly Y, if it was the egg that held some "key"? You would expect the eggs from the same cycle to be receptive to the same type of sperm, so to speak. Or do all the hormones in IVF somehow override the woman's natural environment?

And the other thing I wonder about with MDH is dominance is supposed to be an inherited trait, particularly if we're talking dominance that runs deep enough to impact a woman's biological process. So one would expect that if non-dominant females produced females, they too would be non-dominant ... and produce females. And so on. But if I think about friends I know (small sample of course) who are from all girl families ... they seem to have equal numbers of male/female children.

In all honestly I wish I'd never learned about any of this stuff because I spend far too much time on it, and I can't change the fact that I have 3 DD so it's wasted energy. I think I was better off (mentally, lol) when I chalked my kids gender up to all out chance

Begonia, I'm sorry you're feeling this way and let me attempt to answer your q's to the best of my understanding and ability. I want to say very clearly that DESERVE has nothing to do with gender ratio. Our bodies just take note of things and many of these things are utterly out of our control. It's sad because the boy moms feel they don't deserve to have girls, the girl moms feel that they don't deserve to have boys, but the simple fact is that this is all a matter of cues from the environment and not anything we did or didn't do. We can only control a very small amount of these cues.

First of all, I DO think there's something to the MDH. There has to be some reason aside from diet why some women have girls and others boys because in cultures/animals where everyone eats the same exact diet, some people are still having girls and others boys and there MUST be an explanation for that, if everything else is equal. The data on women with Master's Degrees, who work in male dominated fields, etc. also cannot be chalked up to diet.

That having been said, "something" is not everything. Whatever it is about dominance that sways in some way, MUST have a physical manifestation within our bodies that is doing the swaying. Whether it's CM, "egg priming", ions or whatever, the physical aspect is what is doing the swaying and NOT the lifestyle factors. The lifestyle factors make a person more predispoised to having the physical aspect, but it's the physical aspect that is doing the swaying, SO a person who has the physical aspect is still "set" to produce a child of a particular gender and this is true regardless of lifestyle. We all know that being obese contributes to heart disease, but I know of many people who are rail thin and have heart disease too. Because it's NOT obesity that makes heart disease, it's cholesterol, triglycerides, etc that is the physical manifestation of the cause of heart disease, and even tho most obese people tend to have higher cholesterol and triglycerides, than most thin people do, there are thin people out there who have these things too and they are more likely to develop heart disease regardless of their weight or lifestyle.

Point being, whatever is swaying, if THAT is working pink for you, you'll have girls even if you fit every criteria for diet and dominance that ever existed. I think there are tons of things that could affect those physical aspects that we are not even aware of. It could be experiences we had in childhood or teenage years. We may have undiagnosed illnesses (and there is a not-small subset of illness that actually sways BLUE, not pink) or have or have recovered from an illness that "wants" us to conceive babies of mostly one gender because IT survives better that way (and yes, two such illnesses do exist, both sway blue). It could even be that our diets/chemical exposures as babies or in our mother's womb is controlling this somehow. If we ever severely depleted our bodies or our T levels plummeted for any reason at any point in our lives, it may have activated some mechanism that sways strongly one way or the other - I can envision scenarios where previous depletion/lowered T levels could sway either pink or blue - if your levels dropped so low that they never managed to recover, you would be "set" for pink regardless of anything you did in the future, and if they dropped but recovered somewhat, you might be more "set" for blue even tho your physical condition/T levels were still lower than average. We don't KNOW how our bodies track and register improvements in condition.

Not even getting to what our partners contribute to the equation which may be considerable and I agree with the PP who wondered if maybe sometimes dominant moms ~may~ attract guys who are more likely to shoot blue to begin with. This is OBVIOUSLY far from any kind of universal truth and if you're a dominant gal who has attracted a guy more likely to father daughters, your dominance may not even enter into the equation. Maternal dominance may be a red herring.

When I talk about the fertility theory, I don't mean that women who conceive girls can't get pg or have any difficulty, I mean that if you picture fertility as a continuum with super fertility on one end, infertility on another, I suspect that couples who fall towards the less fertile end of that continuum are more likely to conceive pink. They may never have fertility issues, it's jsut that they're more likely to have whatever physical aspect is swaying pink - be it pH, sperm count, whatever else. You can be very fertile and still conceive girls and some women who struggle with infertility do have boys because of other physical aspects that they have going on (PCOS is one example.)

The hard truth is that you DON'T know that you can have a boy naturally without going HT. None of us do. But if you fit the MDH criteria and you do the right things in terms of diet, supps, etc. then I can say that you have a heck of a lot better chance than someone who doesn't, and doesn't do any of those things.

1)Re "egg priming" I don't believe in egg priming - I don't like any theory that relies on a totally made up hypothesis to explain itself (also why I don't like "ions"). Unless I SEE an egg "choosing" a particular sperm and know what mechanism does it, I put zero stock into this idea. I also think that IVF does not support this idea - even tho some couples do seem to get more embies than should be statistically expected, a lot of other couples

That's how I came up with the fertility theory/sperm numbers theory to begin with - a way to explain gender swaying without resorting to things that do not exist - and I think it explains it as well as anything.

2) Re sperm spinning - actually sperm spinning doesn't have that great of success rates. I know a woman who got a boy with a 92% girl sort and there have been some other opposites as well. Aside from that, people had quite dismal pg rates. Some people have chalked this up to sperm being depleted, but it may also have to do with the idea that some men's X or Y sperm are just BETTER from the very start and getting rid of the one gender leaves only lower quality sperm, the woman's body may actually attack sperm of a particular gender, and/or that the woman's egg is "set" for one gender or another.

3)I do not believe dominance to BE genetically inherited or determined - at least, not in any way that cannot be overridden by environment. People/animals must be very flexible in order to survive, and survival at all other times in history from amoeba on up has been much less a sure thing than it is now. So if a person/family's entire gene pool was inherently "SET" for dominance, the first time their tribe was taken over by a stronger tribe, if you couldn't/wouldn't learn to submit and FAST, you would prob. be killed, or driven off, which is basically the same thing because people couldn't survive on their own back then. If your ancestors couldn't/wouldn't bow to Genghis Khan/Og the Caveman/Bubbles the Chimp, you would not even be here to be discussing dominance on this website LOL. Both submission and dominance are in our genetic heritage and when the cues are right, we shift modes.

I am a pretty dominant chick in a lot of ways but I do notice that in some circumstances I become very submissive to people in authority - almost annoyingly so. Like, I physically can't meet their eyes at times, I desperately want them to like me, and I am not very forthcoming with information I think could get me into trouble (even tho I really don't CARE and I will never even see or speak to the person again). Some ancient program gets activated and it's within all of us, because everyone who couldn't hail to the chief when they needed to, died out at the hands of said chief and all of us have the genetic blueprint of the ones who COULD bend when they needed to bend.

4)Re all girl families - This is just a general observation and not meant to be offensive in any way. I know of a surprising number of women from 3 girl families where all three sisters have all or mostly boys OR two sisters have all boys and then the "black sheep" sister has girls. This also seems to hold largely true in 2 girl families as well - black sheep has girls, superachiever has boys. Perhaps even in mixed gender families - in my family, both girls highly achieving and total of 5 boys, boy is a black sheep and has a girl.

I think there must be something with a pecking order in an all girl family where some/all of the girls fall into a pecking order, birth order, or "mom always liked you best", and some form of the MDH comes into play. That's what I mean when I say some of these things that may have affected our dominance/testosterone levels is a result of things that occured during childhood and not anything about our adult personalities, and certainly nothing we have done "wrong" or can control in any way.

[begonia]

Begonia, you were wondering about in IVF shouldn't the gender split be weighted towards one side or the other if the egg priming thing has any merit... well, if you look at the girls doing IVF it really does seem that they get more embryos of the gender they already have!
I am so much a "boy mom" from the MDH, the personality, the hormonal make-up and yet I had a pretty even gender split with my embryos. (I did however do the low-everything diet for a good portion of the 3 months before I did IVF where my eggs were developing...not on purpose for IVF I was going to sway).
Dr H and I think another RE- Dr Sher was it? think the sperm have a lot to do with it. It could be that most of the time dominant women attract a kind of man where the Y are more dominant in getting to the egg... it really could be all about the man, who knows. Its crazymaking.

Thanks Lindi, that's exactly the information I was wondering about. Fascinating!

It's funny you mention the dominant woman/Y sperm thing ... I was telling DH all about the MDH and he just started laughing. We're both very competitive people (board games at our house are a nightmare!) and he was like, well, of COURSE if your egg is signaling it only wants a Y sperm, my sperm is going to give it an X just to show it who's the boss around here ;-) I think he has finally figured out our personal problem, LOL.