Two days ago I posed a curious question: Are the offspring of artistic men more likely to be boys or girls? Most of the artists I know who are parents (myself included) have all girls or mostly girls, and that seemed a little odd to me.
So far thirty of you have taken my informal survey. The results are below. Assuming everyone followed the rules (you must be male, consider yourself very artistic, and have fathered at least one child), your answers seem to support my crazy little theory:
The total number of children reported so far adds up to 60, or an average of two per artist. Of those kids, 36 are female and only 24 are male. That’s an even 60/40 split (60% girls, 40% boys), or, looked at another way, there are 1-1/2 times more girls than boys. Actually I half-expected there to be an even heavier girl-to-boy ratio, but it’s still interesting that things seem to lean that way.
It’s also worth noting that one respondent had three girls and two more respondents each had four girls, but of all thirty respondents nobody had more than two boys. Of course, those three respondents had a total of eleven girls so you could argue they skewed the results (without them the number of girls and boys would be almost even). I guess it’s all in how you look at it.
Despite the spanky-looking chart none of this is even remotely scientific. This is the internet, not MIT. I majored in art for crying out loud. Still, it’s kinda interesting. Not sure what it means (if anything), so feel free to leave any comments if you have any theories, observations, or one-liners.
I’ll leave the poll open in case more of you want to take part, and if the results change significantly one way or another I’ll be sure to post an update. Thanks to everyone who helped out in this goofy little experiment.