Good-looking couples likely to have daughters

Houston: Wish to have a daughter? Marry a good-looking partner as attractive parents are likely to have girls more often than their homelier counterparts, according to a research.

Beautiful women and men tend to have girls more than those who are less blessed in looks, a study published in the journal Reproductive Sciences said.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, analysed data from a survey of 17,000 babies born in Britain in March 1958, and tracked them at various points in their lives, including at age 7, when they were rated as attractive or unattractive by their

teachers, and at 45, when they were asked to record the age and gender of their children.

After taking into account social status and wealth, Kanazawa found that while the children who were rated as attractive -- 84 per cent of the sample -- were equally likely to have a son or a daughter as their first child, the unattractive children were more likely to have sons.

The average "unattractive" child had a 56 per cent probability of becoming the parent of a boy. "Physical attractiveness is one of the strongest determinants of women's mate value," Kanazawa said.

He believes the trend could be driven by the relative value of attractiveness in men and women.

Men tend to rate attractiveness in women as important when seeking both long-term relationships and casual affairs.

In contrast, women tend to rate physical attractiveness highly only for short-term relationships, ranking traits such as wealth and status as more important in the long term.