Millions of parents around the world sigh with resignation, not relief, when the sonographer says those three little words: ‘It’s a boy’. And in a few months time, Katherine Ryan may join them.
This week, the pregnant comedian joked that she’d feel gender disappointment if she has a boy, telling Heart Radio’s breakfast show: ‘I’m quite big, so I think it might be a boy, so I’m feeling dejected about that, because men have just antagonised me all my life, even before they’re born.’
The 42-year-old, who already has two girls and a boy, then added, more seriously: ‘I didn’t grow up with brothers, so it’s been an adjustment for me.’
And it was this admission that caught my attention, as a woman who’s ‘adjusted’ to having a son.
I’ll start with the usual caveats: I love my son and would not change him for the world. But when the sonographer confirmed I was having a boy, I wasn’t immediately giddy with excitement.
As a woman with a sister, brought up by a fiercely feminist mother and whip-smart nan, I’d imagined myself with a daughter by default. I wouldn’t say I was disappointed, or that I’d especially longed for a girl, but I had this messy, nonsensical idea that a girl might be easier and I’d find it harder to bond with a boy.
It wasn’t that I thought a boy would be ’emotionless’ or a girl would be ‘nuturing’ – or any other gender stereotype – it’s that we live in a world that does still treat men and women in different ways. I only know how to navigate that as a woman.
Perhaps I was getting caught up in a shifting cultural narrative: gender is a social construct, but in 2025, that social construct makes parenting daughters easier than sons.
Everyone wants girls now
After centuries of male domination, where parents wanted boys to pass on the family wealth and name, the global gender imbalance is shifting.
More people want girls now, and as The Economist pointed out last month, this isn’t just because certain countries are putting sex-selective abortions and infanticide in the past.
Between 1985 and 2003, the share of South Korean women who felt it ‘necessary’ to have a son plunged from 48% to 6%, according to South Korea’s statistics agency. Similarly, polls from the Japanese National Fertility Survey suggest in 1982, 48.5% of married couples wanting only one child said they would prefer a daughter. By 2002, 75% did.
The research also uncovered a pro-girl bias in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Portugal, where couples who have a daughter first have fewer children (suggesting couples who have a boy first keep trying for a girl).
In America, where sex-selective IVF is legal, a staggering 80% of couples who choose to use this technique opt for girls.
Adoptive parents, too, tend to want daughters. The UK not-for-profit Creating a Family, which supports prospective parents through the process, estimates that 75-80% of adoptive parents prefer to adopt girls.
On Mumsnet, you’ll find thread after thread of women talking about gender disappointment after hearing they’re expecting a son. As one person pointed out: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread where the poster is disappointed at having a girl.’
Disappointment made my stomach drop.
Writer Rose Stokes admits to feeling gender disappointment when she found out she’d be having a second son last year.
Like me, she’d simply imagined herself with a girl, but also worried how her relationships with her sons would fare as they age, because most of her female friends were close with their mums, but the same couldn’t be said for male friends.
‘I was afraid that, in my older age, my boys would be less likely to keep regular contact and retain emotional closeness with me. The idea frightened me,’ Rose wrote for Metro.
‘Boys leave, girls stay’ is a popular saying among the older generation. It’s a notion deeply drilled into us that women take on a lot of the emotional labour within the family structure and are responsible for keeping everyone together.
‘A friend, when walking with her two boys, the littlest just a few weeks old, was stopped by an old lady who said, “Two boys, what a shame”.’
It’s a hard time to be the mother of boys.
From #MeToo to Andrew Tate, Jeffrey Epstein to Diddy, the past decade has seen exposed poor male behaviour like never before – and yet it keeps on coming.
As a journalist writing about women’s issues, I’ve covered it all. The week I returned from maternity leave, Adolescence-fever swept the nation and I was asked at my desk – as a ‘boymom’ – about my opinion on tackling the rising problem of misogyny among children.
The burden of ‘fixing’ the world’s ills is intimidating, to say the least, and we know this burden still ultimately falls on women – who still take on the lion’s share of parenting in most same-sex partnerships.
And yet, all of that anxiety and anger falls away when I look at my chaotic, cheeky boy, who runs around at alarming speed with his favourite car in his hand, but also gives out the most gentle kisses and sits reading peacefully with his dad. It’s crazy to think there was ever a millisecond when I doubted how he’d fit into our family.
Admitting you have a gender prefence for a child is so tabboo, especially when you consider how many millions of people around the world are childless not by choice. Yet the data is clear that this is happening.
It’s only by talking about it and unpicking our own, messy feelings – and examing the ever-changing society we live in – that we can start to figure out why we feel more inclined to bring up one gender more than the other. Why have we decided that a boy might turn out one way, and a girl another?
That introspection may be uncomfortable, but it only makes you a better parent.
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