Of Beauty, Sex and Power

The statistical analysis underlying Satoshi Kanazawa's claims interesting facts regarding why some parents produce daughters while others produce sons. An analysis might find the probability of a girl birth to be 5% more likely for attractive than for unattractive parents, but with a standard error of 4%. There are other substantive reasons why Kanazawa's hypothesis should not be dismissed out of hand, even though his results are not statistically significant. Based on the scientific literature it is just possible that beautiful parents are one percent more likely than others to have a girl baby, but it is implausible that the difference could be anything on the order of five percent. The 50 most beautiful people of 1996 had 45 girls and 35 boys, which is 56.2% girls, or 7.8 percent more than in the general population.