Interesting fact, according to web page hosted by students at Harvard University, one of the sites that’s blocked in Saudi Arabia is online gender predictor. Why? I can only speculate. In some cultures babies of one gender (for example boys) are preferred over the opposite gender.

Interesting research paper, that might not be relevant to baby gender prediction, describes a technique to determine a gender based on the iris (eye) scan.
Vince Thomas, et. al. from University of Notre Dame published a paper Learning to predict gender from iris images:

Employing decision tree learning made it possible to develop
gender classification models that can reach accuracies
close to 80%. This is a notable result as it has previously been
an unchartered territory.

Granted, it’s impossible to scan baby’s iris while in womb, so this method cannot be used by baby gender prediction. Nonetheless, interesting paper.

When I was pregnant with my first child I was always getting comments from strangers that it is a boy. Apparently I was carrying my Daughter in front, and according to some, this is a sure sign of a boy. Well, guess what, I gave birth to a girl, just like ultrasound promised. So, this is again proves that gender prediction methods are less than perfect. However, in my case the Baby Gender Predictor was correct.

So I asked a question a while back on one of the forums about gender prediction. And I guess I posted to the wrong forum or something, but I got some backlash from women that are trying to get pregnant but cannot for one reason or another. I guess they don’t care about gender, and I can understand that.

When hearing stories about women trying to get pregnant for months or even years, I was always wondering, does birth control pills has anything to do with it? I don’t mean to gloat in my own success, but I got pregnant on the first try, literally, and I’ve never used birth control pills. As soon as my hubby stop pulling out (he he) I got knocked up. I haven’t looked up any studies but is it possible that birth control affects child bearing?

The all important ultrasound… Most of us, I’m sure, place great faith into the accuracy of the ultrasound in gender prediction. However this trust is somewhat misplaced. First of all, the ultrasound is not 100% accurate. According to my doctor, by 14th week the ultrasound is about 90% accurate with most errors made mistakenly identifying boy as a girl. However, things like fetus position and nurse’s skills affect the accuracy of ultrasound.
The important thing to realize that, unless DNA test is done, there is no sure 100% way to determine baby’s gender.

What is old wife tale method of gender prediction? It’s basically just a collection of folklore passed down from generation to generation while distorted and amended. They are not particularly accurate. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I went to the doctor’s office and one of the patients was the old lady who said that I will give birth to a boy because of the way I was carrying. That is an example of old wife tale, which obviously was wrong, because I gave birth to a baby girl.
It does not mean that all wife tales are wrong. There could be some that are relatively accurate. Take a look at some of Old Wife Tales here.

Chinese chart method of gender prediction, as the one here, can be called fairly accurate. But given large enough sample it proves to be around 50% accurate. That certainly makes sense. The Chinese chart method uses mother’s birth date and age to predict baby’s gender. It completely neglects the father’s contribution.

If we look at the conception from the scientific point of view, chromosomes (genes that carry heredity information) can either be X for female or Y for male. Woman has only X chromosome while man has both X and Y. Gender is determined based on which male chromosome makes a contact with female chromosome. XX is a girl while XY is a boy.

Basically Chinese chart neglects to take this mixture of X and Y chromosomes into account. Being 50% accurate is expected since there is an equal chance of conceiving a boy or a girl.

How many parents out there would like to choose the gender of their newborn? I bet – many. I have heard so many stories about parents trying to have a boy but keep having girls. One guy I have met recently has four girls and is still trying to have a boy.

Is there a sure way to predict baby gender? The simple answer is no. The science is not there yet. The only 1oo% sure way to choose the gender is to let doctors inject a mother with a preselected DNA extracted from a father.

Chinese charts and other baby gender prediction methods have pretty large margin of error, sometimes as large as 50%. Why is that? Mother nature is to blame. The evolution created a perfect process to ensure the procreation of species. When approximately equal number of both genders is being born, it ensures that the future generation will find as many mates as possible, therefore ensuring the survival of species. Mess with the process and you might negatively impact the population growth, which might not be a bad idea considering we are outgrowing the replenishment of natural resources.

Next time we will talk about different prediction methods and their accuracy.