The Returning Soldier Effect

The first episode of Hanna Fry's new mini-series Uncharted ...

<parenthesis>
(occupying  the 15 minute slot that belongs BY RIGHT to The World at One – hankering for the good old days? moi?)
</parenthesis>

 ... dealt with a strange phenomenon whereby the ratio of male babies to female babies increases during and after a war.

<grandparental-note>
(And incidentally, I am of course delighted with my four grandsons, but – while not meaning to put undue pressure on my children – it is possible to have too much of a good thing).
</grandparental-note>

An article with a strange title (Big and tall soldiers are more likely to survive battle: a possible explanation for the ‘returning soldier effect’ on the secondary sex ratio)  provides more background...

<oh-yeah>
This strikes me as a questionable assertion; at the very least, it surely depends on the sort of warfare. Big and tall soldiers had an advantage at Stamford Bridge, but not in Sniper's Alley. Still, life's too short to explore this strange claim.
</oh-yeah>

... with an extensive overview of the more recent research.

MacMahon and Pugh (1954) were among the first to observe the effect. They demonstrate that the sex ratio among whites in the USA rose during World War II, but not during World War I. Others have since documented the phenomenon repeatedly (Lowe and McKeown, 1951; van der Broek, 1997; Ellis and Bonin, 2004). In one of the most comprehensive demonstrations, Graffelman and Hoekstra (2000) conclusively show that the secondary sex ratio (sex ratio of live births) increased during and immediately after World Wars in all belligerent nations (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, USA and UK), except for Italy and Spain. In the succinct words of the scientist who has studied sex ratios (of both humans and other animals) more than anybody else, ‘there can be no reasonable doubt that sex ratios (proportions male at birth) have risen during and just after major wars’ (James, 2003, p. 1133).

That 'among the first' does no justice to the seventeenth-century German pastor Johann Peter Sussmilch, who (without reference to twentieth century wars, obvs)   explained everything by reference to Himself:  to repair the loss of young male life in a war, divine providence intervened in the reproductive process to make sure that a majority of boys was born. 

In  Uncharted one of Hanna Fry's main sources is the level-headed David Spiegelhalter, who points out that sex earlier in the mother-to-be's menstrual cycle is more likely to make a male baby, and that – given that if a male baby's already in the works – a female baby isn't going to get a look in. So more sex is going to make more boys. And more sex is going to be on the cards during and after a war. I may have got the wrong end of the stick, but this explanation seems to me more likely than either divine intervention or the size of the father.

<small-print>
The  obvious conclusion (if you want a boy, have more sex) doesn't work though. Professor Fry said that the tendency was so slight that it was impossible to "game the system"...

<tangent>
Interesting word; It seems to me that "game" as a transitive verb (and with the typical object "the system"^{PS: *}

) has only become fashionable in  the last twenty or thirty years. For Further Study (FFS); perhaps it'll make an update – but don't hold your breath.                                         </tangent>

.... That  said, I'm surprised that the obvious research topic "The production of male offspring at the beginning of  a baby-making relationship (when sex is likely to be more frequent)" hasn't been snapped up. Maybe it has. (FFS again).
</small-print>

But this doesn't explain the one big outlier in the data. the biggest spike ever (more than after any war) occurred in 1973. And what about the Falklands War? Was there a spikelet in 1982? Questions, questions.

L'Envoi

Inaction Man has really excelled himself in the last few weeks. Perhaps he's going to put the HS2 question to the party faithful at the conference. You'd think he'd've learnt after his failure against  Liz Truss. Perhaps he's progressing from rolling the pitch on HS2 to polling the rich on how far to row back on his predecessors' green policies.

b

Search for the string game the system

Update 2023.09.29.11:30 – Added footnote    

* My parenthetical surmise was half right. At first I looked in the British National Corpus, and had this unpromising response:

But I couldn't believe I dreamt the usage (or that Professor Fry had been so linguistically innovative), so I looked in the much bigger – and more recently updated – Corpus of Contemporary American English, where the news was much more as I had expected:

Of course, a recent update is necessary to catch a recent language change.

And with a bit of recourse to the Help (as I just searched for game the *) I'm sure I could clarify the (already quite clear) picture of "system"'s supremacy as an object of "game", by wording my search string so as to make "game" a transitive verb; I imagine that in some of the other cases "game" is a noun (in, for example, sentences such as "he wasn't sure he was playing the game the way his teacher would have preferred"). And even if some of those "game the way" do involve a transitive verb, "game the system" is more than twice as common – getting on for three times as common.