Signs You Might Be Conceiving a Boy

Baby!

While we all know that the best way to predict your baby’s gender is with an ultrasound and not with Drano, taking a look at some of the overall trends in gender and birth might give us some insight as to how things might be leaning (at least while you wait for that 20-week ultrasound).

Here are some factors that may play a role in whether or not you have a boy:

  • You live with your partner. One particular study looked at 86,000 pregnancies. Couples that lived together when the baby was conceived were slightly higher to have a boy. 51.5% of births were male in the study. There’s no explanation, of course, why this domestic arrangement would help produce a boy, and the margin is very slight.

  • You’ve been living with your partner under a year. One study shows a slight increase in male births – just under 1% – when the couples lived together less than a year. One theory is that these couples are more likely to have sex frequently, giving a slight advantage to the male sperm. Here again, the odds are very small.

  • You have high stress. High stress periods, such as those following a war, tend to lead to slightly higher male birth rates by about 52% to 48% for girls. There are theories as to why this might be the case, including the higher stress levels of certain hormones like cortisol or testosterone in a woman’s system.

  • You have a higher caloric intake. A British study looked at more than 700 women during pregnancy. The women who had an average intake of 2,400 calories a day or more, 56% had boys. For those women who had an average of around 2,250 or less, 45% had boys.

While you can’t truly control whether you’re going to have a boy or a girl, sometimes it’s fun to speculate. There’s no reason to go out and start eating more food if you’re hoping for a boy or go on a diet if you’re hoping for a girl, of course. The good news is that, no matter what, you have about a 50% chance of having a baby of the preferred gender.