In light of my niece's birth yesterday, I thought this article was interesting. It gives a summary of this recent paper* in the ever-so-boringly-named Journal of Theoretical Biology that describes the statistics of parents with either empathizing occupations (nursing, counseling, etc) or systematizing occupations (engineer, mathematician, etc) and their offspring. They present a theory of evolutionary biology, and the data from the 1994 census to show that empathizing people tend to have more girls and systematizing people tend to have more boys.

I'm not sure how that works out in my family, since my parents are engineer/counsellor with 2 boys, one uncle/aunt are engineer/teacher with 2 girls, and my other uncle didn't yet have children. My brother will be a doctor (is that empathizing or systematizing? The authors chose to not include that occupation in their data) and my wife will be as well. At any rate, I guess I am on track for a more systematic job than my sister-in-law Lily, so their new baby girl lends another data point in favor of the paper's conclusion. And I will have to inform Sarah that she can expect boys. Lots and lots of boys!

*[Kanazawa and Vandermassan, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 233(4) pp589-599 (2005), pdf provided for review, criticism, and scholarship only]