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Comment by yellowbeard | Hacker News Reader

Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.

Yes, exactly. That means that (assuming there are no other gender-dependent birth factors; this is not true but serves to make the point), we should expect to see slightly more females born than males. The 'surplus' females being born to mothers who were stressed enough that, had they conceived a male, the child would have self-aborted. Thus, assuming stress is correlated with divorce, those families are more likely to divorce.

Then how can you explain no correlation before the daughter has become a teenager? If I understood you correctly, you suggest that parents of daughters divorce more often because the daughter was born to a couple of stressed parents (which is more likely to happen than a boy born to that family). If that would be the only cause of the divorce (I'm oversimplyfying, of course), then there would be no difference whether the daughter is a teenager or not. Perhaps parents think of taking care of a child in their first years of life as a moral obligation, which would reduce the divorce rate. However, it's still suspicious that the divorce occurs around the time the daughter reaches puberty, not some time earlier (after she's 5 or something).

> If I understood you correctly, you suggest that parents of daughters divorce more often because the daughter was born to a couple of stressed parents

I don't. I was specifically responding to yellowbeard's comment, which read:

> Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.

Yellowbeard provided one explanation for the fact that, despite male fetuses being more likely to self-abort, there is no difference between divorce stats of young male and female children. My response said why that explanation was wrong. I wasn't saying that the self-abortion delta affects divorce ratios, only that it might.

(Indeed, I do expect that it does have an effect, but that that effect is miniscule and unlikely to be measurable.)

This doesn’t effect the result. They are comparing people with children. If you didn’t have children or aborted a child it’s the same as not getting married. You simply aren’t part of the study because you are irrelevant for the same reason that a kangaroo is irrelevant to the study.

A disproportionate amount of parents with first born daughters over sons is inconsequential because they are measuring the percentage of divorces for each population, not the total number of divorces for each population.

The logic she uses here is really far fetched and unlikely to be true so you really need statistical causal links in order to say anything substantial. I mean her disclosure also discloses a possible bias. She may not have the ability to admit that she her self was the causal factor in her own parents divorce.

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